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THE GOLDEN DAY 


The 
Golden Day 


A Study in American 
Eaperience and Culture 


LEWIS MUMFORD 


fe 


~ BONI AND LIVERIGHT 


oo ow Publishers ow 
NEW YORK MCMXXVI 








COPYRIGHT 1192.6 °42 oes 
BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc. 
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 


“Le 


“py 


First printing, November, 1926 

Second printing, February, 1927 

Third printing, February, 1927 
Fourth printing, April, 1927 


NOTE 


Tis book rounds out the study of American life 
begun in Sticks and Stones. Where in the first book 
I used architecture as an index of our civilization, 
in The Golden Day I have treated imaginative 
_ literature and philosophy as a key to our culture. 
Civilization and culture, the material fact and the 
spiritual form, are not exclusive terms; for one is 
never found without at least a vestige of the other: 
and I need not, I trust, apologize because here and 
there the themes of the two books interpenetrate. 

The substance of this book was delivered in a 
series of lectures on The Development of American 
Culture before a group of European and American 
students at Geneva, in August, 1925. These lec- 
tures were given at the invitation of the Geneva 
Federation; and I gratefully record my debt to Mr. 
and Mrs. Alfred Zimmern for their constant under- 
standing and sympathy. Without the numerous 
explorations Mr. Van Wyck Brooks has made, it 
would have been impossible to make the connected 
study I have here attempted; and without Mr. J. E. 
Spingarn’s criticism of the final draft of the manu- 
script more than one page would have been the 
poorer. The first chapter appeared in The Ameri- 


can Mercury. : 
Lewis Mumrorp. 


” 
ms 
bi 
et 
a 





CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 
I. Tue Oriains of THE AMERICAN MIND. . 11 


II. Tue Romanticism ofr THE PionrER . . 47 
PrleeeeexOLpEN Day .  . . . 2. 2 « 85 
IV. Tue Pracmatic AcquiEscENcE. . . . 157 
V. Tue Pirrace or tHe Past . . . ... 199 
VI. Tue SHapow or THE Muck-RAKE . . . 2383 


eR ir ee gc ee lat ee 1) BTB 





Heaven always bears some 
proportion to earth. 


EMERSON. 





CHAPTER ONE 


THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN MIND 





Z 

Tue settlement of America had its origins in the 
unsettlement of Europe. America came into exist- 
ence when the European was already so distant in 
mind from the ancient ideas and ways of his birth- 
place, that the whole span of the Atlantic did not 
materially widen the gulf. The dissociation, the 
displacement, and finally, the disintegration of 
European culture became most apparent in the New 
World: but the process itself began in Europe, and 
the interests that eventually dominated the Ameri- 
can scene all had their origin in the Old World. 

The Protestant, the inventor, the politician, the 
explorer, the restless delocalized man—all these 
types appeared in Europe before they rallied to- 
gether to form the composite American. If we can 
understand the forces that produced them, we shall 
fathom the origins of the American mind. The 
settlement of the Atlantic seaboard was the culmina- 
tion of one process, the breakup of medieval culture, 


and the beginning of another. If the disintegration 
Pi] 


The Golden Day 


went farthest in America, the processes of renewal 
have, at intervals, been most active in the new coun- 
try; and it is for the beginnings of a genuine cul- 
ture, rather than for its relentless exploitation of 
materials, that the American adventure has been 
significant. ‘To mark the points at which the cul- 
ture of the Old World broke down, and to discover 
in what places a new one has arisen are the two 
poles of this study. Something of value disappeared 
with the colonization of America. Why did it dis- 
appear? Something of value was created. How did 
that come about? If I do not fully answer these 
questions, I purpose, at least, to put them a little 
more sharply, by tracing them to their historic 
beginnings, and by putting them in their social 
context. 


nag 


In the Thirteenth Century the European heritage 
of medieval culture was still intact. By the end of 
the Seventeenth it had become only a heap of 
fragments, and men showed, in their actions if not 
by their professions, that it no longer had a hold 
over their minds. What had happened? 

If one tries to sum up the world as it appeared 


to the contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas or Dante 


[12] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


one is conscious of two main facts. The physical 
earth was bounded by a narrow strip of seas: it 
was limited: while above and beyond it stretched the 
golden canopy of heaven, infinite in all its invitations 
and promises. ‘The medieval culture lived in the 
dream of eternity: within that dream, the visible 
world of cities and castles and caravans was little 
more than the forestage on which the prologue was 
spoken. The drama itself did not properly open 
until the curtains of Death rang down, to destroy 
the illusion of life and to introduce the main scene 
of the drama, in heaven itself. During the Middle 
Ages the visible world was definite and secure. The 
occupations of men were defined, their degree of 
excellence described, and their privileges and duties, 
though not without struggle, were set down. Over 
the daily life lay a whole tissue of meanings, derived 
from the Christian belief in eternity: the notion that 
existence was not a biological activity but a period 
of moral probation, the notion of an intermediate 
hierarchy of human beings that connected the low- 
est sinner with the august Ruler of Heaven, the idea 
that life was significant only on condition that it 
was prolonged, in beatitude or in despair, into the 
next world. The beliefs and symbols of the Chris- 
[13 J 


The Golden Day 
tian Church had guided men, and partly modified 


their activities, for roughly a thousand years. 
Then, one by one, they began to crack; one by one 
they ceased to be “real” or interesting; and gradu- 
ally the dream that held them all together started 
to dissolve. When the process ceased, the united 
order of Christendom had become an array of inde- 
pendent and sovereign States, and the Church itself 
had divided up into a host of repellent sects. 

At what point did medieval culture begin to break 
down? The current answer to this, “With the 


Renaissance,” 


is merely an evasion. When did it 
finally cease to exist? The answer is that a good 
part of it is still operative and has mingled with 
the customs and ideas that have succeeded it. But 
one can, perhaps, give an arbitrary beginning and 
an arbitrary end to the whole process. One may 
say that the first hint of change came in the Thir- 
teenth Century, with the ringing of the bells, and 
that medieval culture ceased to dominate and direct 
the European community when it turned its back 
upon contemporary experience and failed at last to 
absorb the meanings of that experience, or to modify 
its nature. The Church’s inability to control usury; 


her failure to reckon in time with the Protestant 


[14] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


criticism of her internal administration; the unreadi- 
ness of the scholastics to adapt their methods to the 
new interests and criteria of science; the failure to 
prevent the absorption of the free cities, the feudal 
estates, and the monasteries by the central govern- 
ment—these are some of the stigmata of the decline. 
It is impossible to give a date to all of them; but 
it is pretty clear that by the end of the Seventeenth 
Century one or another had come to pass in every 
part of Europe. In countries like England, which 
were therefore “advanced,” all of them had come to 
pass. 

It is fairly easy to follow the general succession 
of events. First, the bells tolled, and the idea of 
time, or rather, temporality, resumed its hold over 
men’s minds. All over Europe, beginning in the 
Thirteenth Century, the townsman erected campa- 
niles and belfries, to record the passing hour. 
Immersed in traffic or handicraft, proud of his city 
or his guild, the citizen began to forget his awful 
fate in eternity; instead, he noted the succession of 
the minutes, and planned to make what he could of 
them. It was an innocent enjoyment, this regular 
tolling of the hour, but it had important conse- 
quences. Ingenious workmen in Italy and Southern 


Germany invented clocks, rigorous mechanical | 


[15] 


The Golden Day 


clocks: they adapted the principle of the woodman’s 
lathe and applied it to metal. Here was the begin- 
ning of the exact arts. The craftsman began by 
measuring time; presently he could measure milli- 
meters, too, and with the knowledge and technique 
introduced by the clockmaker, he was ready to make 
the telescope, the microscope, the theodolite—all of 
them instruments of a new order of spatial explora- 
tion and measurement. 

The interests in time and space advanced side by 
side. In the Fifteenth Century the mapmakers 
devised new means of measuring and charting the 
earth’s surface, and scarcely a generation before 
Columbus’s voyages they began to cover their maps 
with imaginary lines of latitude and longitude. As 
soon as the mariner could calculate his position in 
time and space, the whole ocean was open to him; 
and henceforward even ordinary men, without the 
special skill and courage of a Marco Polo or a Leif 
Ericsson, could travel to distant lands. So time 
and space took possession of the European’s mind. 
Why dream of heaven or eternity, while the world 
was still so wide, and each new tract that was opened 
up promised, if not riches, novelty, and if not 
novelty, well, a new place to breathe in? So the 
bells tolled, and the ships set sail. Secure in his 

[16] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


newly acquired knowledge, the European traveled 
outward in space, and, losing that sense of the 
immediate present which went. with his old belief in 
eternity, he traveled backward and forward in time. 
An interest in archeology and in utopias char- 
acterized the Renaissance. They provided images 
of purely earthly realizations in past and future: 
ancient Syracuse and The City of the Sun were 
equally credible. 

The fall of Constantinople and the diffusion of 
Greek literature had not, perhaps, such a formative 
influence on this change as the historian once 
thought. But they accompanied it, and the image 
of historic Greece and Rome gave the mind a tem- 
porary dwelling-place. Plainly, the knowledge 
which once held it so firmly, the convictions that 
the good Christian once bought so cheaply and cheer- 
fully, no longer sufficed: if they were not altogether 
thrown aside, the humanists began, with the aid 
of classic literature, to fill up the spaces they had 
left open. The European turned aside from his 
traditional cathedrals and began to build according 
to Vitruvius. He took a pagan interest in the 
human body, too, and Leonardo’s St. John was so 
lost to Christianity that he became Bacchus without 
changing a feature. The Virgin herself lost her old 

[177 


The Golden Day 
sanctity. Presto! the Child disappeared, the respon- 


sibilities of motherhood were gone, and she was now 
Venus. What had St. Thomas Aquinas to say 
about theology? One could read the Phedo. What 
had Aristotle to say about natural history? 
Leonardo, unaided, discovered fossils in the Tuscan 
hills and inferred that the ocean was once there. 
Simple peasants might cling to the Virgin, ask for 
the intercession of the saints, and kneel before the 
cross; but these images and ideas had lost their hold 
upon the more acute minds of Europe. They had 
broken, these intellectual adventurers, outside the 
tight little world of Here and Eternity: they were 
interested in Yonder and Yesterday; and since 
eternity was a long way off and we'll “be damnably 
moldy a hundred years hence,” they accepted to- 
morrow as a substitute. 

There were some who found it hard to shake off 
the medieval dream in its entirety; so they retained 
the dream and abandoned all the gracious practices 
that enthroned it in the daily life. As Protestants, 
they rejected the outcome of historic Christianity, 
but not its inception. They believed in the Eucha- 
rist, but they did not enjoy paintings of the Last 
Supper. They believed in the Virgin Mary, but 
they were not softened by the humanity of Her 

[18 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


motherhood. They read, voraciously, the literature 
of the Ancient Jews, and the legends of that sect 
which grew up by the shores of Galilee, but, using 
their private judgment and taking the bare words 
as the sum and substance of their religion, they for- 
got the interpretations from the early Fathers to 
St. Thomas which refined that literature and melted 
it into a comprehensible whole. When the Protes- 
tant renounced justification by works, he included 
under works all the arts which had flourished in the 
medieval church and created an independent realm 
of beauty and magnificence. What remained of the 
faith was perhaps intensified during the first few 
generations of the Protestant espousal—one cannot 
doubt the original intensity and vitality of the 
protest—but alas! so little remained! 

In the bareness of the Protestant cathedral of 
Geneva. one has the beginnings of that hard barracks 
architecture which formed the stone-tenements of 
Seventeenth Century Edinburgh, set a pattern for 
the austere meeting-houses of New England, and 
finally deteriorated into the miserable shanties that 
line Main Street. The meagerness of the Protestant 
ritual began that general starvation of the spirit 
which finally breaks out, after long repression, in 
the absurd jamborees of Odd Fellows, Elks, Wood- 

[19] 


The Golden Day 
men, and kindred fraternities. In short, all that 


was once made manifest in a Chartres, a Strasbourg, 
or a Durham minster, and in the mass, the pageant, 
the art gallery, the theater—all this the Protestant 
bleached out into the bare abstraction of the printed 
word. Did he suffer any hardship in moving to the 
New World? None at all. All that he wanted of 
the Old World he carried within the covers of a 
book. Fortunately for the original Protestants, 
that book was a whole literature; in this, at least, 
it differed from the later protestant canons, per- 
petrated by Joseph Smith or Mrs. Mary Baker 
Eddy. Unfortunately, however, the practices of 
a civilized society cannot be put between two black 
covers. So, in many respects, Protestant society 


ceased to be civilized. 


it 


Our critical eyes are usually a little dimmed by 
the great release of energy during the early Renais- 
sance: we forget that it quickly spent itself. For 
a little while the great humanists, such as More, 
Erasmus, Scaliger, and Rabelais, created a new 
home for the spirit out of the fragments of the past, 
and the new thoughts were cemented together by the 


[ 20 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


old habits of medieval civilization, which persisted 
among the peasants and the craftsmen, long after 
they had been undermined in the Church and the 
palace. 

The revival of classic culture, however, did not 
give men any new power of command over the 
workaday routine of life, for the very ability to 
reénter the past and have commerce with its great 
minds implied leisure and scholarship. Thus the 
great bulk of the community had no direct part in 
the revival, and if the tailor or the tinker abandoned 
the established church, it was only to espouse that 
segment called Protestantism. ‘Tailors and tinkers, 
almost by definition, could not be humanists. More- 
over, beyond a certain point, humanism did not make 
connections with the new experience of the Colum- 
buses and the Newtons any better than did the 
medieval culture. If the criticism of the pagan 
scholars released a good many minds from Catholic 
theology, it did not orient them toward what was 
“new” and “practical” and “coming.” ‘The Renais- 
sance was not, therefore, the launching out of a new 
epoch: it simply witnessed the breakdown and dis- 
ruption of the existing science, myth, and fable. 
When the Royal Society was founded in London in 
the middle of the Seventeenth Century the humanities 


[21 ] 


The Golden Day 


were deliberately excluded. “Science” was indiffer- 
ent to them. 

Once the European, indeed, had abandoned the 
dream of medieval theology, he could not live very 
long on the memory of a classic culture: that, too, 
lost its meaning; that, too, failed to make connec- 
tions with his new experiences in time and space. 
Leaving both behind him, he turned to what seemed 
to him a hard and patent reality: the external world. 
The old symbols, the old ways of living, had become 
a blank. Instead of them, he took refuge in abstrac- 
tions, and reduced the rich actuality of things to a 
bare description of matter and motion. Along this 
path went the early scientists, or natural philoso- 
phers. By mathematical analysis and experiment, 
they extracted from the complicated totality of 
everyday experience just those phenomena which 
could be observed, measured, generalized, and, if 
necessary, repeated. Applying this exact method- 
ology, they learned to predict more accurately the 
movements of the heavenly bodies, to describe more 
precisely the fall of a stone and the flight of a bullet, 
to determine the carrying load of a bridge, or the 
composition of a fragment of “matter.” Rule, 
authority, precedent, general consent—these things 


were all subordinate in scientific procedure to the 


[22] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


methods of observation and mathematical analysis: 
weighing, measuring, timing, decomposing, isolating 
—all operations that led to results. 

At last knowledge could be tested and practice 
reformed; and if the scientists themselves were 
usually too busy to see the upshot of their investiga- 
tions, one who stood on the sidelines, Francis Bacon, 
was quick to announce their conclusion: science 
tended to the relief of man’s estate. 

With the aid of this new procedure, the external 
world was quickly reduced to a semblance of order. 
But the meanings created by science did not lead 
into the core of human life: they applied only to 
“matter,” and if they touched upon life at all, it 
was through a post-mortem analysis, or by follow- 
ing Descartes and arbitrarily treating the human 
organism as if it were automatic and externally 
determined under all conditions. For the scientists, 
these new abstractions were full of meaning and 
very helpful; they tunneled through whole con- 
tinents of knowledge. For the great run of men, 
however, science had no meaning for itself; it trans- 
ferred meaning from the creature proper to his 
estate, considered as an independent and external 
realm. In short, except to the scientist, the only 


consequences of science were practical ones. A new 


[28] 


The Golden Day 


view of the universe developed, naturally, but it was 
accepted less because of any innate credibility than 
because it was accompanied by so many cogent 
proofs of science’s power. Philosophy, religion, art, 
none of these activities had ever baked any bread: 
science was ready, not merely to bake the bread, but 
increase the yield of the wheat, grind the flour and 
eliminate the baker. Even the plain man could ap- 
preciate consequences of this order. Seeing was 
believing. By the middle of the Seventeenth Cen- 
tury all the implications of the process had been 
imaginatively grasped. In 1661 Glanvill wrote: 

“TI doubt not posterity will find many things that 
are now but rumors, verified into practical realities. 
It may be that, some ages hence, a voyage to the 
Southern tracts, yea, possibly to the moon, will not 
be more strange than one to America. To them that 
come after us, it may be as ordinary to buy a pair 
of wings to fly to remotest regions, as now a pair of 
boots to ride a journey; and to confer at the dis- 
tance of the Indies by sympathetic conveyances may 
be as usual in future times as by literary correspond- 
ence. The restoration of gray hairs to juvenility, 
and renewing the exhausted marrow, may at length 
be effected without a miracle; and the turning of 


the now comparatively desert world into a Paradise 


[ 24 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


may not improbably be effected from late agri- 
culture.” 


IV 


The process of abstraction began in the theology 
of Protestantism as an attempt to isolate, deform, 
and remove historic connections; it became habitual 
in the mental operations of the physical scientist ; 
and it was carried over into other departments. 

The extended use of money, to replace barter and 
service, likewise began during this same period of 
disintegration. Need I emphasize that in their 
origin Protestantism, physical science, and finance 
were all liberating influences? They took the place 
of habits and institutions which, plainly, were mori- 
bund, being incapable of renewal from within. Need 
I also emphasize the close historic inter-connection of 
the three things? We must not raise our eyebrows 
when we discover that a scientist like Newton in 
Seventeenth Century England, or Rittenhouse, in 
Eighteenth Century America, became master of the 
mint, nor must we pass by, as a quaint coincidence, 
the fact that Geneva is celebrated both as the home of 
Jean Calvin and as the great center of watches and 


clocks, ‘These connections are not mystical nor fac- 


[25] 


The Golden Day 


titious. The new financial order was a direct out- 
growth of the new theological and scientific views. 
First came a mechanical method of measuring time: 
then a method of measuring space: finally, in money, 
men began more widely to apply an abstract way of 
measuring power, and in money they achieved a 
calculus for all human activity. 

This financial system of measurement released the 
European from his old sense of social and economic 
limitations. No glutton can eat a hundred pheas- 
ants; no drunkard can drink a hundred bottles of 
wine at a sitting; and if any one schemed to have 
so much food and wine brought to his table daily, 
he would be mad. Once he could exchange the 
potential pheasants and Burgundy for marks or 
thalers, he could direct the labor of his neighbors, 
and achieve the place of an aristocrat without being 
to the manner born. Economic activity ceased to 
deal with the tangible realities of the medieval world 
—land and corn and houses and universities and 
cities. It was transformed into the pursuit of an 
abstraction—money. ‘Tangible goods were only a 
means to this supreme end. When some incipient 
Rotarian finally coined the phrase, “Time is money,” 


he expressed philosophically the equivalence of two 
[26 | 


The Origins of the American Mind 


ideas which could not possibly be combined, even in 
thought, so long as money meant houses, food, pic- 
tures, and time meant only what it does in Berg- 
son’s durée, that is, the succession of organic expe- 
riences. 

Does all this seem very remote from the common 
life? On the contrary, it goes to the roots of every 
activity. The difference between historical periods, 
as the late T. E. Hulme pointed out, is a difference 
between the categories of their thought. If we 
have got on the trail of their essential categories, 
we have a thread which will lead outward into even 
remote departments of life. The fact is that from 
the Seventeenth Century onward, almost every field 
was invaded by this process of abstraction. The 
people not affected were either survivals from an 
older epoch, like the orthodox Jews and Roman 
Catholics in theology, or the humanists in literature, 
or they were initiators, working through to a new 
order—men like Lamarck, Wordsworth, Goethe, 
Comte. 

Last and most plainly of all, the disintegration of 
medieval culture became apparent in politics. Just 
as “matter,” when examined by the physicist is ab- 
stracted from the esthetic matrix of our experience, 


so the “individual” was abstracted by the political 
[27 J 


The Golden Day 


philosopher of the new order from the bosom of 
human society. He ceased, this individual, to main- 
tain his omnipresent relations with city, family, 
household, club, college, guild, and office: he became 
the new unit of political society. Having abstracted 
this purely conceptual person in thought—he had, 
of course, no more actual existence than an angel or 
a cherub—the great problem of political thinking 
in the Eighteenth Century became: How shall we 
restore him to society?—for somehow we always find 
man, as Rousseau grimly said, in chains, that is, in 
relations with other human beings. ‘The solution 
that Rousseau and the dominant schools of the time 
offered was ingenious: each individual is endowed 
with natural rights, and he votes these political 
rights into society, as the shareholder votes his 
economic rights into a trading corporation. ‘This 
principle of consent was necessary to the well-being 
of a civil society; and assent was achieved, in free ~ 
political states, through the operation of the ballot, 
and the delivery of the general will by a parliament. 

The doctrine broke the weakening chain of his- 
torical continuity in Europe. It challenged the 
vested interests; it was ready to declare the exist- 
ing corporations bankrupt; it was prepared to wipe 


[ 28 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


away the traditional associations and nets of privi- 
leges which maintained the clergy, the nobility, the 
guilds. On its destructive side, the movement for po- 
litical liberty, like that for free contract, free associa- 
tion, and free investigation, was sane and reasonable; 
for the abuses of the past were genuine and the griev- 
ances usually had more than a small touch of justice. 
We must not, however, be blind to the consequences of 
all these displacements and dissociations. Perhaps 
the briefest way of characterizing them is to say that 
they made America inevitable. To those who were 
engaged in political criticism, it seemed that a 
genuine political order had been created in the set- 
ting up of free institutions; but we can see now that 
the process was an inevitable bit of surgery, rather 
than the beginning of a more organic form of politi- 
cal association. By 1852 Henry James, Sr., was 
keen enough to see what had happened: “Democ- 
racy,” he observed, “is not so much a new form of 
political life as a dissolution and disorganization of 
the old forms. It is simply a resolution of govern- 
ment into the hands of the people, a taking down 
of that which has before existed, and a recommit- 
ment of it to its original sources, but it is by no 


means the substitution of anything else in its place.” 


[29 ] 


The Golden Day 


wv) 


Now we begin to see a little more clearly the state 
of mind out of which the great migrations to the 
New World became possible. The physical causes 
have been dwelt on often enough; it is important to 
recognize that a cultural necessity was at work at 
the same time. The old culture of the Middle Ages 
had broken down; the old heritage lingered on only 
in the “backward” and “unprogressive” countries 
like Italy and Spain, which drifted outside the main 
currents of the European mind. Men’s interests be- 
came externalized ; externalized and abstract. They 
fixed their attention on some narrow aspect of ex- 
perience, and they pushed that to the limit. Intelli- 
gent people were forced to choose between the fos- 
silized shell of an old and complete culture, and the 
new culture, which in origin was thin, partial, ab- 
stract, and deliberately indifferent to man’s proper 
interests. Choosing the second, our Europeans 
already had one foot in America. Let them suffer 
persecution, let the times get hard, let them fall out 
with their governments, let them dream of worldly 
success—and they will come swarming over the 
ocean. The groups that had most completely shaken 
off the old symbolisms were those that were most 

[ 80 J 


The Origins of the American Mind 


ready for the American adventure: they turned 
themselves easily to the mastery of the external 
environment. To them matter alone mattered. 

The ultimate results of this disintegration of 
European culture did not come out, in America, 
until the Nineteenth Century. But its immediate 
consequence became visible, step by step, in the first 
hundred and fifty years or so of the American set- 
tlement. Between the landing of the first colonists 
in Massachusetts, the New Netherlands, Virginia 
and Maryland, and the first thin trickle of hunters 
that passed over the Alleghanies, beginning figura- 
tively with Daniel Boone in 1775, the communities 
of the Atlantic seaboard were outposts of Europe: 
they carried their own moral and intellectual climate 
with them. 

During this period, the limitations in the thought 
of the intellectual classes had not yet wrought them- 
selves out into defects and malformations in the com- 
munity itself: the house, the town, the farm were still 
modeled after patterns formed in Europe. It was 
not a great age, perhaps, but it had found its form. 
Walking through the lanes of Boston, or passing 
over the wide lawns to a manor house in Maryland, 
one would have had no sense of a great wilderness 
beckoning in the beyond. To tell the truth, the wil- 

[31 ] 


The Golden Day 


derness did not beckon: these solid townsmeén, these 
freeholders, these planters, were content with their 
civil habits; and if they thought of expansion, it 
was only over the ocean, in search of Palladian de- 
signs for their houses, or of tea and sperm-oil for 
their personal comfort. On the surface, people lived 
as they had lived in Europe for many a year. 

In the first century of colonization, this life left 
scarcely any deposit in the mind. There was no 
literature but a handful of verses, no music except 
the hymn or some surviving Elizabethan ballad, no 
ideas except those that circled around the dogmas 
of Protestantism. But, with the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, these American communities stepped fully into 
the sphere of European ideas, and there was an 
American equivalent for every new European type. 
It is amusing to follow the leading biographies of 
the time. Distinguished American figures step onto 
the stage, in turn, as if the Muse of History had 
prepared their entrances and exits. Their arrange- 
ment is almost diagrammatic: they form a résumé 
of the European mind. In fact, these Edwardses 
and Franklins seem scarcely living characters: they 
were Protestantism, Science, Finance, Politics. 

The first on the stage was Jonathan Edwards: he 
figured in American thought as the last great expos- 


[ 82 |] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


itor of Calvinism. Edwards wrote like a man in a 
trance, who at bottom is aware that he is talking 
nonsense; for he was in love with beauty of the soul, 
like Plato before him, and it was only because he 
was caught in the premises of determinism that, with 
a heavy conscience, he followed his dire train of 
thought to its destination. After Edwards, Protes- 
tantism lost its intellectual backbone. It devel- 
oped into the bloodless Unitarianism of the early 
Nineteenth Century, which is a sort of humanism 
without courage, or it got caught in orgies of re- 
vivalism, and, under the name of evangelical Chris- 
tianity, threw itself under the hoofs of more than 
one muddy satyr. ‘There were great Protestant 
preachers after Edwards, no doubt: but the triumph 
of a Channing or a Beecher rested upon personal 
qualities; and they no longer drew their thoughts 
from any deep well of conviction. 

All the habits that Protestantism developed, its 
emphasis upon industry, upon self-help, upon thrift, 
upon the evils of “idleness” and “pleasure,’”? upon 
the worldliness and wickedness of the arts, were so 
many gratuitous contributions to the industrial 
revolution. When Professor Morse, the inventor of 
the telegraph, was still a painter, traveling in Italy, 
he recorded in one of his letters the animus that 


[ 33 ] 


The Golden Day 


pervaded his religious creed: the testimony loses 
nothing by being a little belated. “I looked around 
the church,” he wrote, “to ascertain what was the 
effect upon the multitude assembled. . . . Every- 
thing around them, instead of aiding devotion, was 
entirely calculated to destroy it. The imagination 
was addressed by every avenue; music and painting 
pressed into the service of—not religion but the 
contrary—led the mind away from the contempla- 
tion of all that is practical in religion to the charms 
of mere sense. No instruction was imparted; none 
ever seems to be intended.” 

It is but a short step from this attitude to hiring 
revivalist mountebanks to promote factory morale; 
nor are these thoughts far from that fine combina- 
tion of commercial zeal and pious effort which char- 
acterize such auxiliaries as the Y. M. C. A. The 
fictions of poetry and the delusions of feeling were 
the bugbears of Gradgrind, Bounderby, and 
M’Choakumchild in Dickens’s classic picture of in- 
dustrialism: for the shapes and images they called 
forth made those which were familiar to the Protes- 
tant mind a little dreary and futile. It was not 
merely that Protestantism and science had killed the 
old symbols: they must prevent new ones from devel- 
oping: they must abolish the contemplative attitude 

[ 34 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


in which art and myth grow up, and create new 
forms for man’s activities. Hence the fury of effort 
by which the leaders of the new day diverted ener- 
gies to quantitative production. The capacity to do 
work, which the new methods in industry had so 
enormously increased, gave utilitarian objects an 
importance they had not hitherto possessed. Did 
not God’s Word say: “Increase and multiply”? If 
babies, why not goods: if goods, why not dollars? 
Success was the Protestant miracle that justified 
man’s ways to God. 

The next figure that dominated the American 
scene stood even more completely for these new 
forces. He was, according to the pale lights of his 
time, a thoroughly cultivated man, and in his ma- 
turity he was welcomed in London and Paris as the 
equal of scientists like Priestley and Erasmus Dar- 
win, and of scholars like D’Alembert and D’Hol- 
bach. As a citizen, by choice, of Philadelphia, 
Benjamin Franklin adopted the plain manners and 
simple thrifty ways of the Quakers. He went into 
business as a publisher, and with a sort of sweet 
acuteness in the pursuit of money, he imparted the 
secrets of his success in the collection of timely saws 
for which he became famous. The line from Frank- 
lin through Samuel Smiles to the latest advertise- 


[35 J 


The Golden Day 


ments for improving one’s position and doubling 
one’s income, in the paper that dates back to 
Franklin’s ownership, is a pretty direct one. If one 
prefers Franklin’s bourgeois qualities to those of his 
successors, it is only perhaps because his life was 
more fully rounded. If he was not without the usu- 
rious habits of the financier, he had also the dignity 
and freedom of the true scientist. 

For Franklin was equally the money-maker, the 
scientist, the inventor, and the politician, and in 
science his fair boast was that he had not gained a 
penny by any of his discoveries. He experimented 
with electricity; he invented the lightning rod; he 
improved the draft of chimneys; in fact, on his last 
voyage home to America, shortly before his death, 
he was still improving the draft of chimneys. Finally 
he was a Deist: he had gotten rid of all the “gothick 
phantoms” that seemed so puerile and unworthy to 
the quick minds of the Eighteenth Century—which 
meant that he was completely absorbed in the domi- 
nant abstractions and myths of his own time, namely, 
matter, money, and political rights. He accepted 
the mechanical concept of time: time is money; the 
importance of space: space must be conquered; the 
desirability of money: money must be made; and he 


did not see that these, too, are phantoms, in pre- 


[ 36 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


occupation with which a man may lose most of the 
advantages of a civilized life. As a young man, 
Franklin even invented an elaborate system of moral- 
bookkeeping: utilitarianism can go no further. 
Although Franklin’s sagacity as a statesman can 
hardly be overrated, for he had both patience and 
principle, the political side of the American thought 
of his time is best summed up in the doctrines of a 
new immigrant, that excellent friend of humanity, 
Thomas Paine. Paine’s name has served so many 
purposes in polemics that scarcely any one seems to 
take the trouble to read his books: and so more than 
one shallow judgment has found its way into our 
histories of literature, written by worthy men who 
were incapable of enjoying a sound English style, 
or of following, with any pleasure, an honest system 
of thought, clearly expressed. The Rights of Man 
is as simple as a geometrical theorem; it contains, I 
think, most of what is valid in political libertarian- 
ism. JI know of no other thinker who saw more 
clearly through the moral humbug that surrounds 
a good many theories of government. Said Paine: 
“Almost everything appertaining to the circum- 
stances of a nation has been absorbed and con- 
founded under the general and mysterious word 


government. Though it avoids taking to its account 


[ 37 J 


The Golden Day 


the errors it commits and the mischiefs it occasions, 
it fails not to arrogate to itself whatever has the 
appearance of prosperity. It robs industry of its 
honors by pedantically making itself the cause of 
its effects; and purloins from the general character 
of man the merits that appertain to him as a social 
being.” 

Passage after passage in The Rights of Man and 
The Age of Reason is written with the same pithi- 
ness. Paine came to America as an adult, and saw 
the advantages of a fresh start. He believed that 
if first principles could be enunciated, here, and here 
alone, was a genuine opportunity to apply them. 
He summed up the hope in reason and in human con- 
trivance that swelled through the Eighteenth Cen- | 
tury. Without love for any particular country, 
and without that living sense of history which makes 
one accept the community’s past, as one accepts the 
totality of one’s own life, with all its lapses and 
mistakes, he was the vocal immigrant, justifying in 
his political and religious philosophy the complete 
break he had made with old ties, affections, alle- 
giances. 

Unfortunately, a man without a background is 
not more truly a man: he has merely lost the scenes 
and institutions which gave him his proper shape. 


[ 38 J 


The Origins of the American Mind 
If one studies him closely, one will find that he has 


secretly arranged another background, made up of 
shadows that linger in the memory, or he is uneasy 
and restless, settles down, moves on, comes home 
again, lives on hopeless to-morrows, or sinks back 
into mournful yesterdays. The immigrants who 
came to America after the War of Independence gave 
up their fatherland in exchange for a Constitution 
and a Bill of Rights: they forfeited all the habits 
and institutions which had made them men without 
getting anything in exchange except freedom from 
arbitrary misrule. ‘That they made the exchange 
willingly, proves that the conditions behind them 
were intolerable; but that the balance was entirely 
in favor of the new country, is something that we 
may well doubt. When the new settlers migrated 
in bodies, like the Moravians, they sometimes man- 
aged to maintain an effective cultural life; when 
they came alone, as “‘free individuals,’ they gained 
little more than cheap land and the privileges of 
the ballot box. The land itself was all to the good; 
and no one minded the change, or felt any lack, so 
long as he did not stop to compare the platitudes of 
Fourth of July orations with the actualities of the 
Slave Trade, the Constitutional Conventions, Alien 
and Sedition Acts, and Fugitive Slave Laws. 
[ 39 J 


The Golden Day 
It was possible for Paine, in the Eighteenth Cen- 


tury, to believe that culture was served merely by 
the absence of a church, a state, a social order such 
as those under which Europe labored. That was 
the error of his school, for the absence of these harm- 
ful or obsolete institutions left a vacancy in society, 
and that vacancy was filled by work, or more accu- 
rately speaking, by busy work, which fatigued the 
body and diverted the mind from the things which 
should have enriched it. Republican politics aided 
this externalism. People sought to live by politics 
alone; the National State became their religion. 
The flag, as Professor Carleton Hayes has shown, 
supplanted the cross, and the Fathers of the Con- 
stitution the Fathers of the Church. 

The interaction of the dominant interests of in- 
dustry and politics is illustrated in Paine’s life as 
well as Franklin’s. Paine was the inventor of the 
take-down iron bridge. Indeed, politics and inven- 
tion recurred rhythmically in his life, and he turned 
aside from his experiments on the iron bridge to 
answer Edmund Burke’s attack on the French Revo- 
lution. ‘The War of Independence,” as he himself 
said, “energized invention and lessened the catalogue 
of impossibilities. ... As one among thousands 


who had borne a share in that memorable revolu- 


[ 40 ] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


tion, I returned with them to the enjoyment of a 
quiet life, and, that I might not be idle, undertook to 
construct a bridge of a single arch for this river 
[the Schuylkill].” 

That I might not be idle! What a tale those 
words tell! While the aristocracy was in the 
ascendant, patient hirelings used to apply their 
knowledge of hydraulics to the working of fountains, 
as in Versailles, or they devised automatic chess- 
players, or they contrived elaborate clocks which 
struck the hour, jetted water, caused little birds to 
sing and wag their tails, and played selections from 
the operas. It was to such inane and harmless per- 
formances that the new skills in the exact arts were 
first put. The bored patron was amused; life plod- 
ded on; nothing was altered. But in the freedom 
of the new day, the common man, as indifferent to 
the symbols of the older culture as the great lords 
and ladies, innocent of anything to occupy his mind, 
except the notion of controlling matter and master- 
ing the external world—the common man turned to 
inventions. Stupid folk drank heavily, ate glutton- 
ously, and became libertines ; intelligent, industrious 
men like Franklin and Paine, turned their minds to 
increasing the comforts and conveniences of exist- 
ence. Justification by faith: that was politics: the 

[41] 


The Golden Day 


belief in a new heaven and a new earth to be estab- 
lished by regular elections and parliamentary de- 
bate. Justification by works: that was invention. 
No frivolities entered this new religion. ‘The new 
devices all saved labor, decreased distances, and in 
one way or another multiplied riches. 

With these inventors, the American, like his con- 
temporary in Europe, began the utilitarian conquest 
of his environment. From this time on, men with 
an imaginative bias like Morse, the pupil of Benja- 
min West, men like Whitney, the school-teacher, like 
Fulton, the miniature painter, turned to invention 
or at least the commercial exploitation of inventions 
without a qualm of distrust: to abandon the imagina- 
tive arts seemed natural and inevitable, and they no 
longer faced the situation, as the painters of the 
Renaissance had done, with a divided mind. Not 
that America began or monopolized the develop- 
ments of the Industrial Revolution: the great out- 
break of technical patents began, in fact, in England 
about 1760, and the first inklings of the movement 
were already jotted down in Leonardo da Vinci’s 
notebooks. The point is that in Europe heavy 
layers of the old culture kept large sections of the 
directing classes in the old ways. Scholars, literary 


men, historians, artists still felt no need of justify- 


[ 42 |] 


The Origins of the American Mind 


ing themselves by exclusive devotion to practical 
activities. In America, however, the old culture had 
worn thin, and in the rougher parts of the country 
it did not exist. No one in America was unaffected 
by the progress of invention; each improvement was 
quickly cashed in. When Stendhal wrote L’Amour 
the American love of comfort had already become a 
by-word: he refers to it with contempt. 

Given an old culture in ruins, and a new culture 
im vacuo, this externalizing of interest, this ruthless 
exploitation of the physical environment was, it 
would seem, inevitable. Protestantism, science, inven- 
tion, political democracy, all of these institutions 
denied the old values; all of them, by denial or by 
precept or by actual absorption, furthered the new 
activities. ‘Thus in America the new order of Eu- 
rope came quickly into being. If the Nineteenth 
Century found us more raw and rude, it was not 
because we had settled in a new territory; it was 
rather because our minds were not buoyed up by all 
those memorials of a great past that floated over the 
surface of Europe. The American was thus a 
stripped European; and the colonization of America 
can, with justice, be called the dispersion of Europe 


—a movement carried on by people incapable of 


[43] 


The Golden Day 


sharing or continuing its past. It was to America 
that the outcast Europeans turned, without a Moses 
to guide them, to wander in the wilderness; and here 
they have remained in exile, not without an occa- 


sional glimpse, perhaps, of the promised land, 


[ 44] 


CHAPTER TWO 


THE ROMANTICISM OF THE PIONEER 





Tue pioneer lias usually been looked upon as a 
typical product of the American environment; but 
the truth is that he existed in the European mind 
before he made his appearance here. Pioneering 
may in part be described as the Romantic movement 
in action. If one wishes to fathom the pioneer’s 
peculiar behavior, one must not merely study his re- 
lations with the Indians, with the trading companies, 
and with the government’s land policies: one must 
also understand the main currents of European 
thought in the Eighteenth Century. In the episode 
of pioneering, a new system of ideas wedded itself to 
a new set of experiences: the experiences were Amer- 
ican, but the ideas themselves had been nurtured in 
Savoy, in the English lake country, and on the Scots 
moors. Passing into action, these ideas became 
queerly transmogrified, so that it now takes more 
than a little digging to see the relation between 
Chateaubriand and Mark Twain, or Rousseau and 
William James. The pioneer arose out of an ex- 


[47 ] 


The Golden Day 


ternal opportunity, an unopened continent, and out 
of an inward necessity. It is the inward necessity 
that most of our commentators upon him have 
neglected. 

In the Eighteenth Century, Europe became at last 
conscious of the fact that the living sources of its 
older culture had dried up; and it made its first 
attempt to find a basis for a new culture. Many of 
its old institutions were already hollow and rotten. 
The guilds had become nests of obsolete privileges, 
which stood doggedly in the way of any technical im- 
provement. The church, in England and in France, 
had become an institution for providing support to 
the higher ranks of the clergy, who believed only in 
the mundane qualities of bread and wine. In fact, 
all the remains of medieval Europe were in a state 
of pitiable decay; they were like venerable apple- 
trees, burgeoned with suckers and incapable of bear- 
ing fruit. A mere wind would have been enough to 
send the old structure toppling; instead of it, a 
veritable tempest arose, and by the time Voltaire had 
finished with the Church, Montesquieu and Rousseau 
with the State, Turgot and Adam Smith with the old 
corporations, there was scarcely anything left that 


an intelligent man of the Eighteenth Century would 
: [48] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


have cared to carry away. Once the old shelters and 
landmarks were gone, where could people turn? 
The classic past had already been tried, and had 
been found—dull. Medievalism was not yet quite 
dead enough to be revived; chinoiseries were merely 
amusing. ‘There remained one great and permanent 
source of culture, and with a hundred different ges- 
tures the Eighteenth Century acclaimed it—Nature. 

The return to Nature occurred at the very climax 
of an arranged and artificial existence: trees had 
been clipped, hedges had been deformed, architecture 
had become as cold and finicking as a pastrycook’s 
icing, the very hair of the human head had been 
exchanged for the white wig of senility. Precisely at 
this moment, when a purely urbane convention 
seemed established forever, a grand retreat began. 
In the Middle Ages such a retreat would have led 
to the monastery: it now pushed back to the coun- 
try, by valiant mountain paths, like Rousseau’s, or 
by mincing little country lanes, like that which led 
Marie Antoinette to build an English village in Ver- 
sailles, and play at being a milkmaid. Nature was 
the fashion: “every one did it.” If one had re- 
sources, one laid out a landscape park, wild like the 
fells of Yorkshire, picturesque like the hills of Cum- 

[49] 


The Golden Day 
berland, the whole atmosphere heightened by an 


artificial ruin, to show dramatically the dominance 
of Nature over man’s puny handiwork. If one were 
middle class, one built a villa, called Idle Hour, or 
The Hermitage; at the very least, one took country 
walks, or dreamed of a superb adventurous manhood 
in America. 

In the mind of the great leader of this movement, 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Nature was not a fresh 
element in the tissue of European culture: it was a 
complete substitute for the existing institutions, 
conventions, habits, and histories. Rousseau began 
his career with an essay on the question whether the 
restoration of the arts and sciences had the effect of 
purifying or corrupting public morals: he won the 
prize offered by the academy at Dijon by affirming 
their tendency to corrupt; and from that time on- 
ward (1750) he continued to write, with better sense 
but with hardly any decrease in his turbulent con- 
viction, upon the worthlessness of contemporary 
civilization in Europe. His prescription was simple: 
return to Nature: shun society: enjoy solitude. 
Rousseau’s Nature was not Newton’s Nature—a sys- 
tem of matter and motion, ordered by Providence, 


and established in the human mind by nice mathe- 


[ 50 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


matical calculations. By Nature Rousseau meant 
the mountains, like those which shoulder across the 
background of his birthplace; he meant the mantle 
of vegetation, where one might botanize, and see 
“eternity in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild 
flower ;”” he meant the fields, like those of Savoy, 
where a simple peasantry practiced the elementary 
routine of living. 

The return to Nature, in Rousseau’s sense, was 
not a new injunction; nor was it an unsound one. 
As an aid to recovery in physical illness and neu- 
rosis, its value was recognized at least as early as 
Hippocrates, and as a general social formula it has 
played a part in the life and literature of every 
finished civilization. 'The Georgics, the Bucolics, 
and the idylls of classic culture belong to its sophis- 
ticated moments: after the formalities of the Con- 
fucian period lLao-tse’s philosophy developed a 
similar creed and persuaded its individualistic adher- 
ents to renounce the sterile practices of the court and 
the bureaucracy and bury themselves in the Bamboo 
Grove. Nature almost inevitably becomes dominant 
in the mind when the powers of man himself to mold 
his fortunes and make over his institutions seem 


feeble—when, in order to exist at all, it is necessary 


[ 51 J 


The Golden Day 


to accept the wilderness of Nature and human pas- 
sion as “given,” without trying to subdue its dis- 
order. 

What made the authority of Rousseau’s doctrine 
so immense, what made it play such a presiding part 
in European life, echoing through the minds of 
Goethe, Herder, Kant, Wordsworth, and even, quite 
innocently, Blake, was the fact that there awaited 
the European in America a Nature that was primi- 
tive and undefiled. In the purely mythical continent 
that uprose in the European mind, the landscape 
was untainted by human blood and tears, and the 
Red Indian, like Atala, led a life of physical dignity 
and spiritual austerity: the great Sachem was an 
aborigine with the stoic virtues of a Marcus Aure- 
lius. Rousseau’s glorification of peasant life was 
after all subject to scrutiny, and by the time the 
French Revolution came, the peasant had a word 
or two to say about it himself; but the true child 
of Nature in the New World, uncorrupted by the 
superstitions of the Church, could be idealized to the 
heart’s content: his customs could be attributed to 
the unhindered spontaneity of human nature, his 
painfully acquired and transmitted knowledge might 
be laid to instinctive processes; in short, he became a 
pure ideal. Even William Blake could dream of 

[ 52 J 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


liberty on the banks of the Ohio, if not on the banks 
of the Thames. 

In America, if society was futile, one had only 
to walk half a day to escape it; in Europe, if one 
walked half a day one would be in the midst of 
another society. In Europe one had to plan a re- 
treat: in America one simply encountered it. If 
Nature was, as Wordsworth said, a world of ready 
wealth, blessing our minds and hearts with wisdom 
and health and cheerfulness, what place could be 
richer than America? Once Romanticism turned its 
eyes across the ocean, it became a movement indeed. 
It abandoned culture to return to Nature; it left a 
skeleton of the past for an embryo of the future; it 
renounced its hoarded capital and began to live on 
its current income; it forfeited the old and the tried 
for the new and the experimental. This transforma- 
tion was, as Nietzsche said, an immense physiologi- 
cal process, and its result was “the slow emergence of 
an essentially super-national and nomadic species of 
man, who possesses, physiologically speaking, a maxi- 
mum of the art and power of adaptation as his typi- 
cal distinction.” 

The Romantic Movement was thus the great form- 
ative influence which produced not merely the myth 


of pioneering, but the pioneer. But it was not the 


[ 53 | 


The Golden Day 


sole influence upon the scene. Human society was 
divided in the Eighteenth Century between those 
who thought +t perfectible, and those who thought 
that the existing institutions were all essentially 
rotten: the Benthams and the Turgots were on one 
side, the Rousseaus and Blakes on the other, and the 
great mass of people mixed these two incompatible 
doctrines in varying proportions. The perfection- 
ists believed in progress, science, laws, education, 
and comfort; progress was the mode and comfort 
the end of every civil arrangement. The followers of 
Rousseau believed in none of these things. Instead 
of sense, they wanted sensibility; instead of educa- 
tion, spontaneity; instead of smokeless chimneys and 
glass windows and powerlooms, a clear sky and an 
open field. 

If the pioneer was the lawfully begotten child of 
the Romantic Movement, he belonged to the other 
school by adoption. He wanted Nature; and he 
wanted comfort no less. He sought to escape the 
conventions of society; yet his notion of a free gov- 
ernment was one that devoted itself to a perpetual 
process of legislation, and he made no bones about 
appealing to the Central Government when he wanted 
inland waterways and roads and help in exterminat- 


ing the Indian. Society was effete: its machinery 


[54] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


could be perfected—the pioneer accepted both these 
notions. He believed with Rousseau that “man is 
good naturally, and that by institutions only is he 
made bad.” And if the Yankees who first settled in 
Illinois were looked upon as full of “notions” because 
they were wont to take thought for the morrow and 
to multiply mechanical devices, these habits, too, were 
quickly absorbed. As Nature grew empty, progress 
took its place in the mind of the pioneer. Each of 
these ideas turned him from the past, and enabled him 
to speculate, in both the commercial and philosophic 
senses of the word, on the future. 


a 


In America the return to Nature set in before there 
was any physical necessity for filling up the raw 
lands of the West. ‘The movement across the Alle- 
ghanies began long before the East was fully oc- 
cupied: it surged up in the third quarter of the 
Eighteenth Century, after the preliminary scouting 
and road-building by the Ohio Company, and by the 
time the Nineteenth Century was under way, the con- 
quest of the Continent had become the obsession of 
every progressive American community. 


This westward expansion of the pioneer was, with- 


[ 55 J 


The Golden Day 


out doubt, furthered by immediate causes, such as 
the migration of disbanded soldiers after the Revolu- 
tion, endowed with land-warrants; but from the be- 
ginning, the movement was compulsive and almost 
neurotic; and as early as 1837 Peck’s New Guide to 
the West recorded that “migration has become al- 
most a habit.” External matters of fact would per- 
haps account for the New England migration to 
Ohio: they cease to be relevant, however, when they 
are called upon to explain the succession of jumps 
which caused so many settlers to pull up stakes and 
move into Illinois—and then into Missouri—and so 
beyond, until finally the Pacific Coast brought the 
movement temporarily to an end. This restless search 
was something more than a prospecting of resources; 
it was an experimental investigation of Nature, Soli- 
tude, The Primitive Life; and at no stage of the 
journey, however much the story may be obscured by 
land-booms and Indian massacres and gold rushes, 
did these things drop out of the pioneer’s mind. 
Charles Fenno Hoffmann in A Winter in the West 
(1835), was only echoing the unconscious justifica- 
tion of the pioneer when he exclaimed: “What is the 
echo of roofs that a few centuries since rung with 


barbaric revels, or of aisles that pealed the anthems 


[ 56 J 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


of painted pomp, to the silence which has reigned 
in these dim groves since the first fiat of Creation 
was spoken?” 

Mark the difference between this movement and 
that which first planted the colonists of Massachu- 
setts or Pennsylvania in the New World. In the 
first period of the seaboard settlement, America was 
a place where the European could remain more 
nearly his proper self, and keep up the religious 
practices which were threatened by economic innova- 
tions and political infringements in Europe. The 
Puritans, the Moravians, the Dunkers, the Quakers, 
the Catholics, sought America as a refuge in which 
they could preserve in greater security what they 
dearly valued in Europe. But with the drift to the 
West, America became, on the contrary, a place 
where the European could be swiftly transformed 
into something different: where the civil man could 
become a hardy savage, where the social man could 
become an “individual,” where the settled man could 
become a nomad, and the family man could forget 
his old connections. With pioneering, America 
ceased to be an outpost of Europe. The Western 
communities relapsed into an earlier and more 
primitive type of occupation; they reverted to the 
crude practices of the hunter, the woodman, and 


[ 57 | 


The Golden Day 


the miner. Given the occasion and the environment, 
these were necessary occupations; the point to be 
noted, however, is that, uninfluenced by peasant 
habits or the ideas of an old culture, the work of 
the miner, woodman, and hunter led to unmitigated 
destruction and pillage. What happened was just 
the reverse of the old barbarian invasions, which 
turned the Goths and the Vandals into Romans. 
The movement into backwoods America turned the 
European into a barbarian. 

The grisly process of this settlement was described 
by Crévecceur and Cooper long before Professor 
Turner’ summed them up in his classic treatise on 
the passing of the frontier. “In all societies,” says 
Créveceeur, “there are off-casts; this impure part 
serves as our precursors or pioneers. .. . By living 
in or near the woods, their actions are regulated by 
the neighborhood. The deer often come to eat their 
grain, the wolves to destroy their sheep, the bears 
to kill their hogs, the foxes to catch their poultry. 
The surrounding hostility immediately puts the gun 
into their hands; they watch these animals; they 
kill some; and thus, by defending their property, 
they soon become professed hunters; this is the 
progress; once hunters, farewell to the plow. The 


chase renders them ferocious, gloomy, unsociable; a 


[ 58 | 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


hunter wants no neighbors, he rather hates them 
because he dreads competition.” 

Equipped with his ax and his rifle, the two prin- 
cipal weapons of the pioneer, he carried on his war- 
fare against Nature, cutting down the forest and 
slaughtering its living creatures. Instead of seek- 
ing Nature in a wise passiveness, as Wordsworth 
urged, he raped his new mistress in a blind fury of 
obstreperous passion. No one who has read The 
Pioneers can forget Cooper’s account of the sicken- 
ing massacre of wild pigeons, carried on long after 
the need for food had been satisfied. In these prac- 
tices, the ordinary farmer and tradesman of the 
old country went back to a phase of European ex- 
perience which had lingered on chiefly in the archaic 
hunts of a predatory aristocracy; and in the ab- 
sence of any restraints or diversions, these primitive 
practices sank more deeply into the grain. 

The apology for this behavior was based upon 
the noblest grounds; one can scarcely pick up a 
contemporary description of the pioneering period 
without finding a flowery account of the new life, 
put in contrast to wretched, despotic, foolishly 
beautiful Europe; and this animus was echoed even 
in the comments that Hawthorne and Emerson, to 


say nothing of such a real pioneer as Mark Twain, 


[59 J 


The Golden Day 
made upon the institutions of the Old World. Let 


me put the contemporary apology and criticism side 
by side. The first is from a pamphlet by George 
Lunt called Three Eras of New England (1857): 
‘*Whenever this is the state of man the impertinent 
fictions and sophisms of life die out. The borrow- 
ings and lendings of the human creature fall away 
from him under the rigid discipline of primeval neces- 
sities, as the encrusting dirt, which bedimmed the 
diamond, is removed by the hard process which re- 
veals and confirms its inestimable price. ‘The voice 
of the mountain winds would mock at the most indis- 
pensable and best recognized trappings of polished 
society as they rent them away and fastened them 
fluttering in the crevices of a cliff, or bore them on- 
wards to the unknown wilderness, and would hail its 
very discomforts with the shout and laughter of deri- 
sion. ... So far, therefore, as our familiar and in- 
herent characteristics, which form the foundation of 
our nature, and make us good and make us great, are 
liable to become diluted or perverted by the sophisti- 
cations of social being, they may require an actual 
refreshment and renewal, under the severe and inevi- 
table trials of colonial existence. . . . This, then, is 
the absolute law of all legitimate migration, that it 
leaves behind it the weaknesses, the concretions and 


[ 60 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


superfluities of artificial life, and founds its new 
existence upon an appeal to the primordial elements 
of natural society.” 

Against this apology for the deprivations of the 
pioneer life, let me set the comment of a young Eng- 
lish settler named Fordham, who had come face to 
face with the untrammeled Children of Nature; this 
passage occurs on the page after that in which he 
records the amiable slaughter of six Indians, men 
and women, on English Prairie, in the spring of 
1817: 

‘Instead of being more virtuous, as he is less re- 
fined, I am inclined to think that man’s virtues are 
like the fruits of the earth, only excellent when sub- 
jected to culture. The force of the simile you will 
never feel, until you ride in these woods over wild 
_ strawberries, which dye your horses’ fetlocks like 
blood, yet are insipid in flavour; till you have seen 
wagon-loads of grapes, choked by the brambles and 
the poisonous vine; till you find peaches, tasteless 
as a turnip, and roses throwing their leaves of every 
shade upon the wind, with scarcely a scent upon 
them. °*Tis the hand of man that makes the wilder- 
ness shine.” 

The hand of man was of course busy, and here 
and there, particularly in Ohio, Kentucky and 

[61 ] 


The Golden Day 


Tennessee, villages and cities grew up which carried 
on, for a generation or so in the Nineteenth Century, 
the tradition that the seaboard knew in an earlier 
day; but like a river that, rushing onwards, deposits 
its heaviest burdens first, the best people and the 
soundest traditions tended to be deposited in the 
tracts that adjoined the original colonies, and as 
the stream moved further west, the traditions of a 
civil life disappeared, and the proportion of scala- 
wags, cut-throats, bruisers, bullies, and gamblers 
tended to increase, and the wilderness got the upper 
hand. There are plenty of exceptions to this gen- 
eralization, it goes without saying; but Texas and 
Nevada were the poles towards which pionee1 effort 
tended to run. The original process has been ob- 
scured in many places by a second and third wave 
of agriculturists: but it is not hard to get below 
the surface and see what the original reality was. 


III 


The shock of the pioneer’s experience left its 
mark in one or two gestures of anticipation, and in 
an aftermath of regretful reminiscence. ‘The post- 
Civil War writers who deal with Roughing It, A 
Son of the Middle Border, or A Hoosier School- 

[ 62 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


master, to mention only a few examples, had already 
abandoned the scene of the pioneer’s efforts and had 
returned to the East: they made copy of their early 
life, but, though they might be inclined to sigh after 
it, because it was associated with their youth, they 
had only a sentimental notion of continuing it. For 
them, the pioneering experience could be recapitu- 
lated in a night around a camp-fire or a visit to the 
Wild West Show, which the astute Barnum had in- 
troduced to the denizens of New York in a day when 
the West was still in fact wild. A genuine culture and 
a relevant way of life do not lose their significance 
so easily; and the thin-skinnedness of the pioneer 
in the face of criticism, and the eagerness of the 
post-pioneer generation—The Inheritors of Susan 
Glaspell’s play—to identify themselves with the cul- 
ture of the past, shows, I think, that at bottom the 
pioneer realized that his efforts had gone awry. 
One is faced by the paradox that the formative 
elements in the pioneer’s career expressed them- 
selves in literature almost at the very outset of the 
movement, in the works of men who were in fact al- 
most as aloof from the realities of the western exodus 
as Chateaubriand himself; and although the pioneer 
types and the pioneer adventures have been repeated 


in literature of the rubber-stamp pattern from 


[ 63 J 


The Golden Day 


Gustave Aimard to Zane Grey, what was valid and 
what was peculiar in the pioneer regime was em- 
bodied, once for all, by James Fenimore Cooper. 
These‘ new contacts, these new scenes, these ad- 
ventures, served to create just three genuine folk- 
heroes. In these heroes, the habits of the pioneer 
were raised to the plane of a pattern. 

Cooper’s Leatherstocking was the new Natur- 
Mensch, established on a platform of simple human 
dignity. He was versed in the art of the woods, 
with the training of the aborigine himself; he shared 
the reticence and shyness that the Amerind perhaps 
showed in the company of strangers; and above the 
tender heart he exhibited mutely in The Deerslayer, 
he disclosed a leathery imperturbability. His eye 
was unerring; and it was only in instinct that 
Chingachgook, the Indian, sometimes surpassed this 
great hunter and warrior. Leatherstocking’s bullet, 
which drives the bullet that has already hit the 
bull’s eye still deeper into the target is, of course, no 
ordinary bullet: it shared the inevitable enlargement 
of the hero’s powers. Not every pioneer, needless 
to say, was a Natty Bumpo; but the shy, reserved, 
taciturn, dryly humorous hunter was the sort of 
being the pioneer tended, under the first stress of 


his new association, to become. Cooper himself 


[ 64 |] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


painted other pioneer types, the sullen squatter, 
Ishmael, the fur trader, the frontier soldier, the 
woodman, the bee-hunter; but the fact that he had 
already outlined the character of Leatherstocking in 
the equally shrewd and reserved Spy of the Neutral 
Ground, Harvey Birch, showed, I believe, that this 
figure had become a property of his unconscious. 
First a hunter, then a scout, then a trapper, 
Leatherstocking encompassed the chief pioneering 
experiences; it required a generation or two before 
the trader became the boomtown manufacturer, and 
the manufacturer the realtor and financier, dealing 
only with the tokens of industry. Like the first 
pioneers, Leatherstocking fled before the smoke of 
the settler’s domestic fire, as before the prairie fire 
itself. With all the shoddiness of Cooper’s imagin- 
ative constructions, he was plainly seized by a great 
character: his novels live solely through their cen- 
tral conception of Leatherstocking. The hard man, 
a Sir Giles Overreach, or the cunning man, Ulysses, 
had been portrayed before in literature; but the 
hardness and craft of Leatherstocking brought 
forth a new quality, which came directly from the 
woods and the prairies. When the pioneer called 
his first political hero Old Hickory he poetically 
expressed this new truth of character: barbarians or 


[ 65 J 


The Golden Day 


outlaws they might be, these pioneers, but their 
heroes grew straight. This straightness is the great 
quality one feels in Lincoln. It was as if, after 
centuries of clipping and pruning, we had at last 
allowed a tree to grow to its full height, shaped only 
by snow, rain, sun, wind, frost. A too timid and 
complacent culture may sacrifice the inner strength 
to an agreeable conformity to a common mold, a little 
undersized. ‘These Old Hickories, on the other 
hand, grew a little scraggly and awkward; but in 
their reach, one would catch, occasionally, a hint 
of the innate possibilities of the species. 

In the course of the Nineteenth Century, Leather- 
stocking was joined by an even more authentic folk 
hero, Paul Bunyan, whose gigantic shape, partly 
perhaps derived from Gargantua through his French- 
Canadian forebears, took form over the fire in the 
logger’s shack. Paul Bunyan, properly enough, 
was an axman; and, as if to complete the symbolism 
and identify himself more completely with the prime 
activities of the new American type, he was also a 
great inventor. He figures on a continental scale. 
All his prowess and strength is based upon the 
notion that a thing becomes a hundred times as im- 
portant if it is a hundred times as big. The habit 


of counting and “calculating” and “figuring” and 


[ 66 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


“reckoning” and “guessing”—the habit, that is, of 
exchanging quality for number—is expressed in 
nearly all of Bunyan’s exploits. In a day when no 
one dared point to the string of shacks that formed 
the frontier town as a proof of the qualitative 
beauties and delights of a pioneer community, the 
popular imagination took refuge in a statistical 
criterion of value: they counted heads: they counted 
money: they counted miles: they counted anything 
that lent itself to large figures. 

This habit grew to such an extent that people 
began to appreciate its comic quality; in the Bun- 
yan tales it is a device of humor as well as of heroic 
exaggeration. For many years, as the legend was 
quietly growing and expanding, Paul Bunyan lurked 
under the surface of our life: we lived by his light, 
even if we were ignorant of his legend. He, too, 
like Leatherstocking, was aloof from women; and 
this fact is not without significance; for with the 
woman the rough bachelor life must come to an end, 
and though the pioneer might carry his family with 
him, bedstead, baby, and all, they were sooner or 
later bound to domesticate him, and make him settle 
down. Woman was the chief enemy of the pioneer: 
she courageously rose to the burdens of the new 
life, and demanded her place side by side in the 

[67 J 


The Golden Day 


legislature: but in the end she had her revenge, in 
temperance clubs, in anti-vice societies, or in the 
general tarnation tidiness of ‘Tom Sawyer’s aunt. 
When Whitman sang of the Perfect Comrade, he did 
not at first think of woman: so far from indicating 
a special sexual anomaly in Whitman, it is rather a 
tribute to his imaginative identification with the col- 
lective experience of his generation. 

At the same time, another folk-hero arose in liter- 
ature, at first sight an incomprehensible one. He 
was neither heroic, nor, on the surface, a pioneer; 
and the story that brought him forth was a rather 
commonplace fantasy of an earlier day. Yet the 
history of Rip Van Winkle shows that he has had 
a deep hold on the American mind: Irving’s tale 
itself remains a popular legend, and the play that 
was written about him as early as the eighteen- 
thirties was remodeled by succeeding generations 
of American actors, until given its classic form by 
Joseph Jefferson. How did this happen? ‘The 
reason, I think, was that Rip’s adventures and dis- 
appointments stood for that of the typical American 
of the pioneer period. Inept at consecutive work, 
harried by his wife, and disgusted with human 
society, he retires to the hills with his dog and his 


gun. He drinks heavily, falls asleep, and becomes 


[ 68 |] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


enchanted. At the end of twenty years he awakes 
to find himself in a different society. The old land- 
marks have gone; the old faces have disappeared ; 
all the outward aspects of life have changed. At 
the bottom, however, Rip himself has not changed; 
for he has been drunk and lost in a dream, and for all 
that the calendar and the clock records, he remains, 
mentally, a boy. 

There was the fate of a whole generation: in- 
deed, is it not still the fate of perhaps the great 
majority of Americans, lost in their dreams of a 
great fortune in real-estate, rubber, or oil? In our 
heroic moments, we may think of ourselves as 
Leatherstockings, or two-fisted fellows like Paul 
Bunyan; but in the bottom of our hearts, we are 
disconsolate Rips. In this process of uneasy transi- 
tion, in the endless experimentalism and externality 
of the American scheme, the American came to feel 
that something was wrong. He saw no way of 
rectifying the fact itself; the necessity to be “up 
and moving” seemed written in the skies. In his dis- 
appointment and frustration, he became maudlin. 
It is no accident that our most sentimental popular 
songs aJl date back to the earlier half of the Nine- 
teenth Century. At the moment when the eagle 


screamed loudest, when the words Manifest Destiny 


[ 69 J 


The Golden Day 


were put into circulation, when Colonel Diver, the 
fire-eater, Jefferson Brick, the editor of the Rowdy 
Journal, and Scadder, the real-estate gambler, were 
joining voices in a Hallelujah of triumph,—it was 
then that the tear of regret and the melancholy 
clutch of the Adam’s apple made their way into the 
ballad. 

The great song of the mid-century was “Don’t 
you remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?” but the truth 
is that Alice was merely a name to start the tears 
rolling. It was not over the fate of Alice that the 
manly heart grieved: what hurt was the fact that in 
the short space of twenty years, the mill-wheel had 
fallen to pieces, the rafters had tumbled in, the 
cabin had gone to ruin, the tree had been felled, and 
“where once the lord of the forest waved” were grass 
and golden grain. In short, ruin and change lay 
in the wake of the pioneer, as he went westering. 
“There is change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt, 
they have changed from the old to the new,” and 
somehow this progressive generation had an uneasy 
suspicion that they were not changing altogether 
for the better. What a conflict was in the pioneer’s 
bosom! He pulls up stakes, to the tune of Home 
Sweet Home. He sells his parcel of real estate to 
the next gambler who will hold it, still sighing “there 


[70 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


is no place like home.” He guts out the forest: 
“Woodman, spare that tree, touch not a single 
bough, in youth it sheltered me, and I'll protect it 
now.” 
Red Varmints he is driving to the Land of the Sunset 


the Song of Hiawatha slips from his hip-pocket. 


And in the struggle of scalping one of the 


Does this seem to exaggerate the conflict? Be 
assured that it was there. The Mark Twains, Bret 
Hartes, and Artemus Wards would not have found 
the old solidities of Europe so ingratiating, taught 
as they were to despise Europe’s cities and institu- 
tions as the relics of a miserable and feudal past, 
if the life they had known had not too often starved 


their essential humanity. 


IV 


With the experience of the Great War behind us, 
we can now understand a little better the psychal 
state of our various American communities, whilst 
they were immersed in their besetting “war against 
Nature.” A war automatically either draws people 
into the service, or, if they resist, unfits them for 
carrying on their civil duties in a whole-hearted 
manner. In the pioneer’s war against Nature, 


every member of the community was bound to take 


[71] 


The Golden Day 


part, or be branded as a dilettante, a skulker, a 
deserter. The phrases that were used in justifica- 
tion of pioneering during the Nineteenth Century 
were not those which set the Romantic Movement in ~ 
action in the Kighteenth: these newcomers sought to 
“conquer a wilderness,” ‘“‘subdue Nature,” “take 
possession of the continent.” ‘To act that each 
to-morrow finds us farther than to-day,” was the 
very breath of the new pioneer mores: the Psalm of 
Life was the sum of the pioneer’s life. 

The throb and urge of this grand march across 
the continent communicated itself to those who re- 
mained in the Kast. The non-combatants in Boston, 
Philadelphia, and New York were as uneasy and 
hesitating in their activities as a conscript who ex- 
pects at any moment to be called to the colors. 
Some of them, like C. F. Adams, were only too happy 
when the Civil War turned the call of the pioneer 
into a command; others, like George Perkins Marsh 
confessed that “in our place and day the scholar 
hath no vocation,” and made plain with what reluc- 
tance they turned their backs upon science and the 
humane arts to struggle in the world of business; 
others, like William Cullen Bryant, threw a handful 
of Nature poems into the scales, to weigh over 


against a life of zealous energy in newspaperdom. 


[72] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


In these, and many other equally irritating biog- 
raphies, one finds that the myth of the Pioneer 
Conquest had taken possession of even the finer and 
more sensitive minds: they accepted the uglinesses 
and brutalities of pioneering, even as many of our 
contemporaries accepted the bestialities of war, and 
instead of recognizing no other necessity than their 
best desires, they throttled their desires and bowed to 
an imaginary necessity. In the end, the pioneer was 
as far from Rousseau and Wordsworth as the in- 
ventor of poison gas was from the troubadour who 
sang the Song of Roland. 

The effect of the pioneer habits upon our culture 
has become a commonplace of literary criticism dur- 
ing the last half-generation; the weakness of this 
criticism has been the failure to grasp the difference 
in origin between the puritan, the pioneer, and the 
inventor-business man. The Puritan did indeed pave 
the way for the extroverts that came after him; but 
what he really sought was an inner grace. The 
pioneer debased all the old values of a settled cul- 
ture, and made the path of a dehumanized industrial- 
ism in America as smooth as a concrete road; but 
it was only in the habits he had developed, so to say, 
on the road, that he turned aside from the proper 
goal of the Romantic Movement, which was to find 


[73 J 


The Golden Day 


a basis for a fresh effort in culture, and gave him- 
self over to the inventor-businessman’s search for 
power. All three, Puritan, pioneer, and business- 
man came to exist through the breakdown of 
Europe’s earlier, integrated culture; but, given the 
wide elbow room of America, each type tended to 
develop to its extreme, only to emerge in succeeding 
generations into the composite character of that 
fictitious person, the Average American. 

In order to appreciate the distance between the 
America of the Eighteenth Century, which was still 
attached umbilically to the older Europe, and the 
America of the pioneer, tinctured by the puritan 
and the industrialist, one might perhaps compare 
two representative men, Thomas Jefferson and Mark 
Twain. When Mark Twain went to Europe during 
the Gilded Age, he was really an innocent abroad: 
his experience in Roughing It had not fitted him for 
any sort of seasoned contact with climates, councils, 
governments. When Jefferson went to Paris from 
the backwoods of Virginia, a hundred years earlier, 
he was a cultivated man, walking among his peers: 
he criticized English architecture, not as Mark 
Twain might have done, because it was effete and 
feudal, but because it was even more barbarous than 
that of the American provinces. To Mark Twain, 


ea 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


as to most of his contemporaries, industry appeared 
in the light of what sporting people call a good 
thing; when, after sinking a small fortune in a new 
typesetting machine, he approached his friend H. H. 
Rogers with another invention, the chief attraction 
he emphasized was its potential monopoly. Jeffer- 
son’s concern with the practical arts, on the other 
hand, was personal and esthetic: he was an active 
farmer, with a carefully kept nursery book, and he 
brought back to America prints and measurements 
of public buildings, which served him in the design 
of his own. 

The death of Jefferson, the scholar, the artist, 
the statesman, and agriculturist—one of the last 
true figures of the Renaissance—was symbolic; for 
it came in 1826, just at the moment when the great 
westward expansion began. In two men of the fol- 
lowing generation, S. F. B. Morse and Edgar Allan 
Poe, we find the new pioneer mores working towards 
their two legitimate goals. Morse defended his pre- 
occupation with criticism, instead of painting, in 
words that might have been framed as an illustration 
of the mood I have been trying to describe. “If I 
am to be the Pioneer, and am fitted for it, why should 
I not glory as much in felling trees and clearing away 


rubbish as in showing the decorations suited to a 


[75 ] 


The Golden Day 


more advanced state of culture?” As for Poe, the 
Walpole of a belated Gothic revival, he recorded in 
literature the displacement and dissociation that 
was taking place in the community’s life. 

With no conscious connection with the life about 
him, Poe became nevertheless the literary equivalent 
of the industrialist and the pioneer. I have no desire 
to speak lightly of Poe’s capacities as a critic of 
literature, which were high, nor of his skill in the 
formal exercises of literary composition. Poe was 
the first artist consciously to give the short-story 
a succinct and final form; and as an esthetic ex- 
perimentalist his own arrangements in prose pre- 
pared the way, among other things, for Baudelaire’s 
prose poems. Yet Poe’s meticulous and rationalistic 
mind fitted his environment and mirrored its inner 
characteristics far more readily than a superficial 
look at it would lead one to believe. In him, the 
springs of human desire had not so much frozen up 
as turned to metal: his world was, in one of his 
favorite words, plutonian, like that of Watt and 
Fulton and Gradgrind: the tears that he dropped 
were steel beads, and his mind worked like a mechan- 
ical hopper, even when there were no appropriate 
materials to throw into it. It happened to be a 


very good mind; and when it had something valu- 


[76] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


able to work upon, as in literary criticism, the results 
were often excellent. Left to himself, however, he 
either spent his energies on small ingenuities like 
ciphers and “scientific” puzzles, or he created a 
synthetic world, half-pasteboard and half-perfume, 
whose thinness as an imaginative reality was equaled 
only by its apparent dissociation from the actualities 
that surrounded him. The criticism of Poe’s fan- 
tasies is not that they were “unreal”: Shakespeare’s 
are equally so: the criticism is that they have their 
sources in a starved and limited humanity, the same 
starved and limited humanity in which Gradgrind 
devoted himself to “hard facts,” and the frontier 
fighter to cold steel. Terror and cruelty dominated 
Poe’s mind; and terror and cruelty leave a scar on 
almost every tale and anecdote about pioneer life. 
The emotional equivalence of Poe’s fiction and the 
pioneer’s fact was perhaps a matter of chance; I 
will not strain my point by trying to make out a 
case for anything else. That the equivalence is not 
a meretricious presumption on my part, is attested, 
I think, by the fact that it was corroborated a gen- 
eration later in the anecdotes of Mark Twain and 
the short stories of Ambrose Bierce. No sensitive 
mind can undergo warfare or pioneering, with all 


the raw savagery of human nature developed to the 


Des 


The Golden Day 


full, without undergoing a shock. The massacres, 
the banditries, even the coarse practical jokes, all 
left their detestable impressions. ‘There is a mock- 
sinister side to the Romantic Movement in European 
literature in the horror stories of Walpole and 
Mrs. Radcliffe; but these stories are mere pap for 
infants alongside those Mark Twain was able to 
recount in almost every chapter of Roughing It and 
Life on the Mississippi. 

Poe, perhaps, had never heard one of these stories ; 
but the dehumanized world he created gave a place 
for terrors, cruelties, and murders which expressed, 
in a sublimated and eminently readable form, the 
sadisms and masochisms of the pioneer’s life. Man 
is, after all, a domestic animal; and though he may 
return to unbroken nature as a relief from all the 
sobrieties of existence, he can reside for long in the 
wilderness only by losing some of the essential 
qualities of the cultivated human species. Poe had 
lost these qualities, neurotically, without even seeing 
the wilderness. Cooper’s generation had dreamed 
of Leatherstocking; in realization, the dream had 
become the nightmare world of Poe. There is 
scarcely a page of reliable testimony about pioneer 
life which does not hint at this nightmare. The 
resoumony is all the more salient when one finds 


[78 J 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


Mark Twain reciting his horrors in a vein of pure 
innocence, without a word of criticism, and then, by 
a psychic transfer, becoming ferociously indignant 
over the same things when he finds them in his im- 


aginary Court of King Arthur. 


Vv 


The vast gap between the hope of the Romantic 
Movement and the reality of the pioneer period is 
one of the most sardonic jests of history. On one 
side, the bucolic innocence of the Eighteenth Cen- 
tury, its belief in a fresh start, and its attempt to 
achieve a new culture. And over against it, the epic 
march of the covered wagon, leaving behind it de- 
serted villages, bleak cities, depleted soils, and the 
sick and exhausted souls that engraved their epitaphs 
in Mr. Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Against 
the genuine heroism and derring-do that accom- 
panied this movement, and against the real gains 
that it achieved here and there in the spread of 
social well-being, must be set off the crudities of 
the pioneer’s sexual life, his bestial swilling and 
drinking and bullying, and his barbarities in dealing 
with the original inhabitants—“a fierce dull biped 
standing in our way.” The gun and the ax and the 


[79 ] 


The Golden Day 
pick, alas! had taught their lessons only too well; 


and the more social and codperative groups, like the 
Mormons, were attacked violently, but always under 
the cover of high moral indignation, by belligerent 
worthies whose morals would have given a bad odor 
to a hangman’s picnic. 

The truth is that the life of the pioneer was bare 
and insufficient: he did not really face Nature, he 
merely evaded society. Divorced from its social 
context, his experience became meaningless. That 
is why, perhaps, he kept on changing his occupation 
and his habitat, for as long as he could keep on 
moving he could forget that, in his own phrase, he 
was not “getting anywhere.” He had no end of 
experiences: he could shoot, build, plant, chop, saw, 
dicker: he was Ulysses, Nimrod, Noah, and Cain 
all bundled into one man. But there was, all too 
literally, no end to these activities—that is, no op- 
portunity to refine them, to separate the ore from 
the slag, to live them over again in the mind. In 
short, the pioneer experience did not produce a 
rounded pioneer culture; and if the new settler began 
as an unconscious follower of Rousseau, he was only 
too ready, after the first flush of effort, to barter 
all his glorious heritage for gas light and paved 
streets and starched collars and skyscrapers and the 


[ 80 ] 


The Romanticism of the Pioneer 


other insignia of a truly high and _ progressive 
civilization. The return to Nature led, ironically, 
to a denatured environment, and when, after the 
long journey was over, the pioneer became conscious 
once more of the social obligation, these interests 
manifested themselves in covert pathological ways, 
like campaigns to prohibit the cigarette or to pre- 
scribe the length of sheets for hotel beds, or to 
promote institutions of compulsory good fellowship. 
So much for an experience that failed either to ab- 


sorb an old culture or create a new one! 


[81] 





CHAPTER THREE 
THE GOLDEN DAY 





I 
THE MORNING STAR 


No one who was awake in the early part of the 
Nineteenth Century was unaware that in the prac- 
tical arrangements of life men were on the brink of 
a great change. The rumble of the industrial revo- 
lution was heard in the distance long before the 
storm actually broke; and before American society 
was completely transformed through the work of 
the land-pioneer and the industrial pioneer, there 
arose here and there over the land groups of people 
who anticipated the effects of this revolution and 
were in revolt against all its preoccupations. Some 
of these groups reverted to an archaic theocracy, 
like that of the Mormons, in which a grotesque body 
of beliefs was combined with an extraordinary 
amount of economic sagacity and statesmanship; 
some of them became disciples of Fourier and sought 
to live in codperative colonies, which would foster 
men’s various capacities more fully than the utilita- 


rian community. 


[ 85] 


The Golden Day 
The air quivered with both hope and trepidation. 


In the new industrial cities, the slum made its ap- 
pearance; great bodies of depauperate immigrants 
with strange traditions altered the balance of 
power ; politics became the business of clever rapscal- 
lions who looted the public treasury; by the end of 
the fifties an editorial writer in Harper’s Weekly 
prayed for professional admninistraeee who might 
bring a public consience into the corrupt democracy 
of the big cities. In general, all the forces that 
blighted America after the Civil War existed in 
embryonic form between 1830 and 1860. At the 
same time, the older regions began to reap the 
fruits of two centuries of contact with the new soil 
and new customs. It is at the hour when the old 
ways are breaking up that men step outside them 
sufficiently to feel their beauty and significance: 
lovers are often closest at the moment of parting. 
In New England, the inherited medieval civilization 
had become a shell; but, drying up, it left behind 
a sweet acrid aroma, and for a brief day it had a 
more intense existence in the spirit. Before the 
life itself collapsed, men felt the full weight of it in 
their imagination. In the act of passing away, the 


Puritan begot the Transcendentalist, and the will- 
[ 86 J 


The Golden Day 


to-power, which had made him what he was, with 
his firm but forbidding character, and his conscien- 
tious but narrow activity, gave way to the will-to- 
perfection. 

The period from 1830 to 1860 was in America 
one of disintegration and fulfillment: the new and 
the old, the crude and the complete, the base and 
the noble mingled together. Puritan fanatics like 
Goodyear brought to the vulcanization of rubber 
the same intense passion that Thoreau brought to 
Nature: sharp mountebanks like Barnum grew out 
of the same sort of Connecticut village that nour- 
ished an inspired schoolmaster like Bronson Alcott: 
genuine statesmen like Brigham Young organized 
the colonization of Utah whilst nonentities like 
Pierce and Buchanan governed the whole country. 
During this period, the old culture of the seaboard 
settlement had its Golden Day in the mind; the 
America of the migrations, on the other hand, partly 
because of weaknesses developed in the pioneer, 
partly because of the one-sided interests of the in- 
dustrialist, and partly because of the volcanic erup- 
tion of the Civil War had up to 1890 little more 
than the boomtown optimism of the Gilded Age to 


justify its existence. 


[ 87] 


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Despite the foreboding that every intelligent 
mind felt when it contemplated the barbarism of the 
industrial age, inimical to any culture except that 
which grew out of its own inhuman absorption in 
abstract matter and abstract power, the dominant 
note of the period was one of hope. Before the 
Civil War the promise of the Westward march ex- 
panded the sense of achievement that came over the 
Eastern States; and men faced the world with a con- 
fidence that went beyond the complacent optimism of 
the British Utilitarians—tainted as that was by 
Carlyle’s dire reminders of the palpable wreckage 
and jetsam that had been washed into the slums of 
London, Manchester, and Birmingham on the wave 
of “industrial prosperity.” 

There were no Carlyles or Ruskins in America 
during this period; they were almost unthinkable. 
One might live in this atmosphere, or one might 
grapple with the White Whale and die; but if one 
lived, one lived without distrust, without inner com- 
plaint, and even if one scorned the ways of one’s 
fellows, as Thoreau did, one remained among them, 
and sought to remedy in oneself the abuses that ex- 
isted in society. Transcendentalism might criticize 


a fossilized past; but no one imagined that the 
[ 88 ] 


The Golden Day 


future could be equally fossilized. The testimony 
is unqualified. One breathed hope, as one might 
breathe the heady air of early autumn, pungent 
with the smell of hickory fires and baking bread, as 
one walked through the village street. 

“One cannot look on the freedom of this country, 
in connection with its youth,” wrote Emerson in 
The Young American, “without a presentment that 
here shall laws and institutions exist in some propor- 
tion to the majesty of Nature. . . . It is a country 
of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expec- 
tations. It has no past: all has.an onward and pro- 
spective look.” The voice of Whitman echoed Emer- 
son through a trumpet: but that of Melville, writ- 
ing in 1850, was no less sanguine and full-pulsed: 
“God has predestinated, mankind expects, great 
things from our race; and great things we feel 
in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon 
be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; 
the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness 
of untried things, to break a new path in the New 
World that is ours. In our youth is our strength; 
in our inexperience, our wisdom.” 

“Every institution is the lengthened shadow of a 


man.” Here and there in America during its Golden 


[89 ] 


The Golden Day 


Day grew up a man who cast a shadow over the 
landscape. They left no labor-saving machines, no 
discoveries, and no wealthy bequests to found a 
library or a hospital: what they left was something 
much less and much more than that-——an heroic con- 
ception of life. They peopled the landscape with 
their own shapes. ‘This period nourished men, as 
no other has done in America before or since. Up 
to that time, the American communities were provin- 
cial; when it was over, they had lost their base, and 
spreading all over the landscape, deluged with new- 
comers speaking strange languages and carrying on 
Old-World customs, they lost that essential like- 
ness which is a necessary basis for intimate communi- 
cation. The first settlement was complete: agricul- 
tural and industrial life were still in balance in the 
older parts of the country; and on the seas trade 
opened up activities for the adventurous. When 
Ticknor was preparing to go to Germany, in the first 
decade of the century, there was but one German 
dictionary, apparently, in New England. Within 
a generation, Goethe was translated, selections from 
the European classics were published; and importa- 
tions of the Indian, Chinese and Persian classics 
widened the horizon of people who had known India 
only by its shawls, China only by its tea. 
[90 ] 


The Golden Day 


The traffic of the American merchantman across 
the seas brought ideas with every load of goods. 
Living lustily in all these new experiences, the push- 
ing back of the frontier, the intercourse with the 
Ancient East, the promises of science and inven- 
tion—steamboats: railroads: telegraphs: rubber 
raincoats: reapers: Von Baer: Faraday: Darwin:— 
living in these things, and believing in them, the 
capacity for philosophic exploration increased, too; 
and when an Emerson went into retreat, he retired 
with an armful of experiences and ideas comparable 
only to the treasuries that the Elizabethans grandly 
looted. Within the circle of the daily fact, the 
Transcendentalists might protest against the dull 
materialism which was beginning to dominate the 
period: but it needed only a little boldness to con- 
vert the materialism itself into a source of new po- 
tencies. , 

An imaginative New World came to birth during 
this period, a new hemisphere in the geography of 
the mind. That world was the climax of American 
experience. What preceded led up to it: what fol- 
lowed, dwindled away from it; and we who think and 
write to-day are either continuing the first explo- 


ration, or we are disheartened, and relapse into some 


[91] 


The Golden Day 


stale formula, or console ourselves with empty ges- 
tures of frivolity. 

The American scene was a challenge; and men 
rose toit. The writers of this period were not alone; 
if they were outcasts in the company of the usual 
run of merchants, manufacturers, and politicians, 
they were at all events attended by a company of 
people who had shared their experience and moved 
on eagerly with it. When all is reckoned, however, 
there is nothing in the minor writers that is not 
pretty fully recorded by Emerson, Thoreau, Whit- 
man, Melville, and Hawthorne. These men, as Mr. 
D. H. Lawrence has well said, reached a verge. 'They 
stood between two worlds. Part of their experience 
enabled them to bring the protestant movement to 
its conclusion: the critical examination of men, 
creeds, and institutions, which is the vital core of 
protestantism, could not go much further. But 
already, out of another part of their experience, 
that which arose out of free institutions planted in 
an unpreémpted soil, molded by fresh contact with 
forest and sea and the more ingenious works of 
man, already this experience pushed them beyond 
the pit Melville fell into, and led them towards new 
institutions, a new art, a new philosophy, formed on 


the basis of a wider past than the European, caught 


[92 ] 


The Golden Day 


by his Mediterranean or Palestinian cultures, was 
capable of seizing. | 

It was the organic break with Europe’s past that 
enabled the American to go on; just as the immi- 
gration of people to America came to include speci- 
mens from almost all the folk of the world, so the 
American past widened sufficiently to bring Eastern 
and Western cultures into a common focus. The 
American went on. Whereas, in their search for a 
new basis for culture, Nietzsche went back to pre- 
Socratic Greece, Carlyle to Abbot Samson, Tolstoi 
and Dostoevsky to primitive Christianity, and Wag- 
ner to the early Germanic fables, Emerson, Thoreau, 
and Whitman went forward leaning on the ex- 
periences about them, using the past as the logger 
uses the corduroy road, to push further into the 
wilderness and still have a sound bottom under him. 
They fathomed the possibilities, these Americans, of 
a modern basis for culture, and fathoming it, were 
nearer to the sources of culture, nearer to the forma- 
tive thinkers and poets of the past, than those who 
sought to restore the past. What is vital in the 
American writers of the Golden Day grew out of a 
life which opened up to them every part of their 
social heritage. And a thousand more experiences 


and fifty million more people have made us no wiser. 


[98 J 


The Golden Day 


The spiritual fact remains unalterable, as Emerson 
said, by many or few particulars. It is the spiritual 
fact of American experience that we shall examine 


during the period of its clearest expression. 


II 


All the important thinkers who shared in this large 
experience were born between 1800 and 1820; their 
best work was done by the time the Civil War came; 
if not beyond the reach of its hurt, they at all events 
could not be completely overthrown or warped by 
it. The leader of these minds, the central figure of 
them all, was Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was the 
first American philosopher with a fresh doctrine: he 
was the first American poet with a fresh theme: he 
was the first American prose writer to escape, by way 
of the Elizabethan dramatists and the Seventeenth 
Century preachers, from the smooth prose of Ad- 
dison or the stilted periods of Johnson. He was an 
original, in the sense that he was a source: he was 
the glacier that became the white mountain torrent 
of Thoreau, and expanded into the serene, ample- 
bosomed lake of Whitman. He loses a little by this 
icy centrality: he must be climbed, and there is so 


much of him that people become satisfied with a 


[94] 


The Golden Day 
brief glimpse, and forget that they have not reached 


the summit which dominates the lower peaks and 
platforms. His very coldness seems familiar to 
academic minds; and for too long they appropriated 
him, as one of them: they forgot that his coldness is 
not that of an impotence, but of an inner intensity: 
it burns! The outward manner of his life was mild: 
there are summer afternoons when from the distance 
Mont Blanc itself seems little more than a cone of 
ice-cream; and his contemporaries forgot that this 
sweet man carried a lash, a lash that would not 
merely drive the money-changers from the temple 
but the priests. 

Emerson was a sort of living essence. The 
preacher, the farmer, the scholar, the sturdy New 
England freeholder, yes, and the shrewd Yankee 
peddler or mechanic, were all encompassed by him; 
but what they meant in actual life had fallen away 
from him: he répresented what they stood for in 
eternity. With Emerson’s works one might recon- 
struct the landscape and society of New England: 
a few things would be left out from Nature which 
Thoreau would have to supply for us—a handful of 
flora and fauna, and the new Irish immigrants who 
were already building the railroads and who finally 
were to take possession of Boston—but what re- 


[95 ] 


The Golden Day 


mained would still be everything of importance in 
the New England scheme of things. The weaknesses 
of New England are there, too: its bookishness, its 
failure, as Margaret Fuller said of Emerson, to kiss 
the earth sufficiently, its impatience to assume too 
quickly an upright position, its too-tidy moral house- 
keeping. Strong or weak, Emerson was complete: 
in his thought the potentialities of New England 
were finally expressed. | 
It is almost impossible to sum up Emerson’s doc- 
trine, for he touched life on many sides, and what is 
more, he touched it freshly, so though he is a Platon- 
ist, one will not find Plato’s doctrines of Art in his 
essay on Art; and though he was in a very derivative 
way a Kantian, one will not find Kant’s principles at 
the bottom of his ethics. With most of the resources 
of the past at his command, Emerson achieved naked- 
ness: his central doctrine is the virtue of this in- 
tellectual, or cultural, nakedness: the virtue of get- 
ting beyond the institution, the habit, the ritual, 
and finding out what it means afresh in one’s own 
consciousness. Protestantism had dared to go this 
far with respect to certain minor aspects of the 
Catholic cult: Emerson applied the same method in 
a more sweeping way, and buoyed up by his faith in 
the future of America—a country endowed with 


[96 ] 


The Golden Day 


perhaps every advantage except venerability—he 
asked not merely what Catholic ritual means, but 
all ritual, not merely what dynastic politics means 
but all politics; and so with every other important 
aspect of life. Emerson divested everything of its 
associations, and seized it afresh, to make what as- 
sociations it could with the life he had lived and the 
experience he had assimilated. As a result, each 
part of the past came to him on equal terms: Buddha 
had perhaps as much to give as Christ: Hafiz could 
teach him as much as Shakespeare or Dante. More- 
over, every fragment of present experience lost its 
associated values, too: towards the _ established 
hierarchy of experiences, with vested interests that 
no longer, perhaps, could exhibit the original power 
of sword or spade, he extended the democratic chal- 
lenge: perhaps new experiences belonged to the sum- 
mit of aristocracy, and old lines were dying out, or 
were already dead, leaving only empty venerated 
names. 

Emerson saw the implications of this attempt to 
re-think life, and to accept only what was his. He 
did not shrink from them. “Nothing is at last sacred 
but the integrity of your own mind. .. . I remem- 
ber an answer which when quite young I was 


prompted to make to a valued adviser, who was 


[97] 


The Golden Day 


wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines 
of the church. On my saying, ‘What have I to do 
with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly 
from within?’ my friend suggested,—‘But these im- 
pulses may be from below, not from above.’ I re- 
plied, ‘ They do not seem to me to be such; but if 
I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the 
Devil.’ No law can be sacred to me but that of my 
Nature.” 

“Life only avails, not the having lived.” There 
is the kernel of the Emersonian doctrine of self-re- 
liance: it is the answer which the American, in the 
day of his confidence and achievement, flung back 
into the face of Europe, where the “having lived” 
has always been so conspicuous and formidable. In 
a certain sense, this doctrine was a barbarism; but 
it was a creative barbarism, a barbarism that aimed 
to use the old buildings not as a shell, but as a 
quarry; neither casting them aside altogether, nor 
attempting wretchedly to fit a new and lush ex- 
istence into the old forms. ‘The transcendental 
young photographer, in Hawthorne’s House of the 
Seven Gables, suggested that houses should be built 
afresh every generation, instead of lingering on in 
dingy security, never really fitting the needs of any 
family, but that which originally conceived and 

[98] 


The Golden Day 
built it. An uncreative age is aghast at this sug- 


gestion: for the new building may be cruder than 
the old, the new problem may not awaken sufficient 
creative capacities, equal to the previous one: these 
are the necessary counsels of prudence, impotence. 

In the heyday of the American adventure, neither 
Emerson nor Hawthorne was afraid. Emerson re- 
thought life, and in the mind he coined new shapes 
and images and institutions, ready to take the place 
of those he discarded. <A building was perishable; 
a custom might fall into disuse; but what of it? 
The mind was inexhaustible; and it was only the un- 
awakened and unimaginative practical people who 
did not feel that these dearly purchased trinkets 
might all be thrown into the melting pot and shaped 
over again, without a penny lost. It was not that 
nakedness itself was so desirable: but clothes were 
cheap! Why keep on piecing together and patch- 
ing the old doctrines, when the supply never could 
run out, so long as life nourished Emersons? ‘We 
shall not always set so great a price,” he exclaimed, 
“on a few texts, a few lives. We are like children 
who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and 
tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talents 
and character they chance to see,—painfully recol- 


lecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when 


[99 ] 


The Golden Day 


they come into the point of view which these had 
who uttered these sayings, they understand them, 
and are willing to let the words go; for at any time, 
they can use words as good when the occasion 
comes. . . . When we have new perceptions, we shall 
gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treas- 
ures, as of old rubbish.” 


I 


The Platonism of Emerson’s mind has been over- 
emphasized; or rather, it has been misconstrued to 
mean that he lived in a perpetual cloud-world. The 
truth is, however, that Emerson’s Platonism was not 
a matter simply of following Plato: it was a matter 
_ of living like Plato, and achieving a similar mode of 
thought. ‘Critics have too often spoken of Plato’s 
forms as if they were merely a weak escape from the 
urgent problems of Fifth-Century Athens; and of 
Emerson’s, as if they were a neurotic withdrawal 
from the hurly-burly of American life. They were 
both, in a sense, a withdrawal; but it was a with- 
drawal of water into a reservoir, or of grain into a 
bin, so that they might be available later, if they 
could not be effectively distributed at once. Both 
Plato and Emerson had mixed with the life about 

[ 100 ] 


The Golden Day 


them and knew its concrete details: both were con- 
scious of the purely makeshift character of existing 
institutions; both were aware that they were in a 
period of transition. Instead of busying himself 
with the little details of political or economic read- 
justment, each sought to achieve a pattern which 
would permit the details to fall into place, and so 
make possible a creative renovation. Emerson wrote 
about Man the Reformer; but he never belonged to 
any political sect or cult. The blight of Negro 
slavery awakened his honest anger, and his essay 
on the Knownothings is an excellent diatribe: but 
even this great issue did not cause him to lose his 
perspective: he sought to abolish the white slaves 
who maintained that institution. 

In coupling Emerson’s name with Plato’s I have 
hinted that Emerson was a philosopher; I see no 
reason to qualify this hint, or to apologize for the 
juxtaposition. He has been more or less grudgingly 
given such a place by current philosophic commen- 
tators, because on a superficial examination there 
is no originality in his metaphysics: both Plato and 
Kant had given an independent reality to the world 
of ideas, and the habit of treating existing facts as 
symbols is so ancient it became a shocking novelty 


when reémployed in our own time by Dr. Sigmund 


[101 ] 


The Golden Day 
Freud. ‘The bare metaphysical outlines of Emer- 


son’s work give no insight, however, into the body 
of his thought as a whole. The contents of Em- 
erson’s philosophy is much richer, I think, than that 
of any of his contemporaries ; and he is denied a high 
place in philosophy largely because the content is 
so rich that it cannot be recognized, in the atten- 
uated twilight of academic groves, as philosophy. 
Hegel and Comte and Spencer, Emerson’s contem- 
poraries, had all found formule which led them 
into relations with a vast mass of concrete facts: 
the weakness of their several philosophies was due 
to severe defects of personality—they were sexually 
neurotic, like Comte, with his pathetic apotheosis of 
Clothilde, or they were querulous invalids, like 
Spencer, who had never been able to correct by a 
wider experience the original bias given to his mind 
by his early training as a railroad engineer. Em- 
erson had the good fortune to live a healthy and 
symmetrical life: he answered Tolstoi’s demand for 
essential greatness—he had no kinks. In him, phi- 
losophy resumed the full gamut of human experience 
it had known in Pythagoras and Plato. 

Emerson’s uniqueness, for his time, consists in 
the fact that he appreciated not merely the factual 
data of science, and the instrumental truth of sci- 


[ 102 ] 


The Golden Day 


entific investigation: he also recognized the forma- 
tive role of ideas, and he saw the importance of 
“dialectic” in placing new patterns before the mind 
which did not exist, ready-made, in the order of 
Nature. ‘All the facts of the animal economy, sex, 
nutriment, gestation, birth, growth, are symbols of 
the passage of the world into the soul of man, to 
suffer there a change, and reappear a new and higher 
fact.” The occasion for, or the efficacy of, this 
passage into the soul of man was denied by the ex- 
ternalism of Nineteenth Century empiricism; ob- 
scurely, it was the ground for contention between 
religion and science, a quarrel which religion lost by 
holding fast to a purely superstitious empiricism. 
If instrumental truths are the only order of truth, 
all religion is a superstition, all poetry a puerility, 
and all art itself is a weak anticipation of photog- 
raphy and mechanical drawing. 

Emerson’s affirmation of both physics and dialec- 
tic, of both science and myth, an affirmation which 
justified the existence of the artist, the poet, the 
saint, was of prime importance; for he did not make 
the mistake of disdaining the order and power that 
science had achieved within its proper department. 
Emerson was a Darwinist before the Origin of 


Species was published, because he was familiar with 


[ 103] 


The Golden Day 


the investigations which were linking together the 
chain of organic continuity, and he was ready to 
follow the facts wherever they would lead him. 
Agassiz, Cambridge’s great man of science, accepted 
the facts, too; but he was afraid of them; insulated 
in his evangelical Christianity, he insisted that the 
facts did not exist in Nature but in the mind of 
God. Emerson was untroubled by Agassiz’s reluc- 
tance: the function of “God” was perpetually being 
performed for him in the passage of the world into 
the soul of man; and there was nothing in his phi- 
losophy to make him deny an orderly sequence in 
Nature. For Emerson, matter and spirit were not 
enemies in conflict: they were phases of man’s ex- 
perience: matter passed into spirit and became a 
symbol: spirit passed into matter and gave it a 
form; and symbols and forms were the essences 
through which man lived and fulfilled his proper 
being. Who was there among Emerson’s contempo- 
raries in the Nineteenth Century that was gifted with 
such a complete vision? ‘To withhold the name of 
philosopher from the man who saw and expressed 
this integral vision of life so clearly is to deny the 
central office of philosophy. 

Emerson’s thought does not seal the world up into 


a few packets, tied with a formula, and place them 


[ 104 ] 


The Golden Day 


in a pigeonhole. In the past, it was not limited to 
a phase of Christianity, nor a phase of classic cul- 
ture: it roamed over a much wider area, and as he 
himself suggested, used Plato and Proclus, not for 
what they were, but as so many added colors for 
his palette. The past for Emerson was neither a 
prescription nor a burden: it was rather an esthetic 
experience. Being no longer inevitable in America, 
that is, no longer something handed down with a 
living at Corpus Christi or a place at court, the past 
could be entertained freely and experimentally. It 
could be revalued; and the paradox of Brahma be- 
came as acceptable as the paradox that the meek 
shall inherit the earth. 

The poet, for Emerson, was the liberator; and in 
that sense, he was a great poet. With him one does 
not feel that our “civilization nears its meridian, but 
rather that we are yet only at the cock-crowing and 
the morning star.” The promise of America, of an 
unspotted Nature and a fresh start, had seeped into 
every pore of Emerson’s mind. “Do not set the 
least value on what I do,” he warns, “nor the least 
discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle 
anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No 
facts to me are sacred; none are profane; I simply 


experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my 


[105 ] 


The Golden Day 
back. . . . Why should we import rags and relics 


into the new hour? . . . Nothing is secure but life, 
transition, the energizing spirit. No love can be 
bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a 
higher love. No truth so sublime but it may be 
trivial to-morrow in the light of new thoughts. 
People wish to be settled: only as far as they are un- 
settled is there any hope for them.” 

The vigor of this challenge, the challenge of the 
American wilderness, the challenge of the new Ameri- 
can society, where the European lost the security of 
his past in order to gain a better stake in the 
future—who but can feel that this is what was dis- 
tinguished and interesting in our American experi- 
ence, and what was salutary, for all its incidental 
defects, in the dumb physical bravado of the pioneer? 
Two men met the challenge and carried it further: 
Thoreau and Whitman. They completed the Emer- 
sonian circle, carrying the potted flower of the 
scholar’s study out into the spring sunshine, the up- 
turned earth, and the keen air. 


[106] 


IV 
THE DAWN 


Tue pioneer who broke the trail westward left 
scarcely a trace of his adventure in the mind: what 
remains are the tags of pioneer customs, and mere 
souvenirs of the past, like the Pittsburg stogy, which 
is our living connection to-day with the Conestoga 
wagon, whose drivers used to roll cigars as the first 
covered wagons plodded over the Alleghanies. 

What the pioneer felt, if he felt anything, in the 
midst of these new solitudes; what he dreamt, if he 
dreamt anything; all these things we must surmise 
from a few snatches of song, from the commonplace 
reports issued as the trail was nearing its end, by 
the generation of Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland, 
or by the reflections of their sons and daughters, 
romantically eager, like John G. Neihardt’s, criti- 
cally reflective, like Susan Glaspell’s, or wistfully 
sordid, like Edgar Lee Masters’ Anthology. Those 
who really faced the wilderness, and sought to make 
something out of it, remained in the East; in their 


[107] 


The Golden Day 


reflection, one sees the reality that might have been. 
Henry David Thoreau was perhaps the only man 
who paused to give a report of the full experience. 
In a period when men were on the move, he remained 
still; when men were on the make, he remained poor; 
when civil disobedience broke out in the lawlessness 
of the cattle thief and the mining town rowdy, by 
sheer neglect, Thoreau practiced civil disobedience 
as a principle, in protest against the Mexican War, 
the Fugitive Slave Law, and slavery itself. Thoreau 
in his life and letters shows what the pioneer move- 
ment might have come to if this great migration 
had sought culture rather than material conquest, 
and an intensity of life, rather than mere extension 
over the continent. 

Born in Concord about half a generation after 
Emerson, Thoreau found himself without the pre- 
liminary searchings and reachings of the young 
clergyman. He started from the point that his 
fellow-townsman, Emerson, had reached; and where 
the first cleared out of his mind every idea that made 
no direct connections with his personal experience, 
Thoreau cleared out of his life itself every custom 
or physical apparatus, to boot, which could not stand 
up and justify its existence. “A native of the 
United States,” De Tocqueville had observed, “clings 

[ 108 ] 


The Golden Day 


to the world’s goods as if he were certain never to 
die; and he is so hasty at grasping at all within his 
reach, that one would suppose he was constantly 
afraid of not living long enough to enjoy them. He 
clutches everything, he holds nothing fast, but soon 
loosens his grasp to pursue fresh gratifications.” 
Thoreau completely reversed this process: it was 
because he wanted to live fully that he turned away 
from everything that did not serve towards this 
end. He prized the minutes for what they brought, 
and would not exercise his citizenship at the town 
meeting, if a spring day by Walden Pond had greater 
promise; nor would he fill his hours with gainful 
practices, as a maker of pencils or a surveyor, be- 
yond what was needed for the bare business of keep- 
ing his bodily self warm and active. 

Thoreau seized the opportunity to consider what 
in its essentials a truly human life was; he sought, 
in Walden, to find out what degree of food, clothing, 
shelter, labor was necessary to sustain it. It was 
not animal hardihood or a merely tough physical 
regimen he was after; nor did he fancy, for all that 
he wrote in contempt of current civilization, that the 
condition of the woodcutter, the hunter, or the 


American Indian was in itself to be preferred. What 


. 109 ] 


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he discovered was that people are so eager to get 
the ostentatious “necessaries” of a civil life that 
they lose the opportunity to profit by civilization 
itself: while their physical wants are complicated, 
their lives, culturally, are not enriched in propor- 
tion, but are rather pauperized and bleached. 
Thoreau was completely oblivious to the domi- 
nant myths that had been bequeathed by the Seven- 
teenth Century. Indifferent to the illusion of mag- 
nitude, he felt that Walden Pond, rightly viewed, 
was as vast as the ocean, and the woods and fields 
and swamps of Concord were as inexhaustible as 
the Dark Continent. In his study of Nature, he had 
recourse on occasion to the scientific botanists and 
zoologists ; but he himself had possession of a method 
that they were slow to arrive at; and it is easier for 
us to-day to understand the metaphysical distinction 
of Thoreau’s kind of nature study than it would 
have been for Gray or Agassiz. Like Wordsworth 
before him, like Bergson after him, he realized that 
in current science “we murder to dissect,” and he 
passed beyond the artful dismemberments of con- 
temporary science to the flower and the bird and the 
habitat themselves. ‘Not a single scientific term or 
distinction,” he wrote once in his notebook, “is the 


least to the purpose. You would fain perceive some- 


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thing and you must approach the object totally un- 


prejudiced. You must be aware that nothing is 
what you take it to be. . . . Your greatest success 
will be simply to perceive that such things are, and 
you will have no communication to make to the 
Royal Society.” In other words, Thoreau sought 
in nature all the manifold qualities of being; he 
was not merely in search of those likenesses or dis- 
tinctions which help to create classified indexes and 
build up a system. The esthetic qualities of a fern 
were as important for his mode of apprehension as 
the number of spores on a frond; it was not that he 
disdained science, but that, like the old herbalists 
and naturalists he admired, he would not let the 
practical offices of science, its classification, its meas- 
urements, its numerations, take precedence over other 
forms of understanding. Science, practiced in this 
fashion, is truly part of a humane life, and a Darwin 
dancing for joy over a slide in his microscope, or a 
Pupin, finding the path to physics through his con- 
templation of the stars he watched as a herd-boy 
through the night, are not poorer scientists but 
richer ones for these joys and delights: they merely 
bow to the bias of utilitarianism when they leave 
these things out of their reports. In his attitude 
toward scientific truth Thoreau was perhaps a 


Tog We ad 


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prophetic figure; and a new age may do honor to 
his metaphysics as well as to his humanity. 

The resolute acceptance of his immediate milieu 
as equal to the utmost that the earth could offer, 
stood by Thoreau in his other activities, too. He 
captained huckleberry parties as he might have led 
a battle, and was just as much the leader in one as 
he would have been in the other. His courage he. 
reserved for better occasions than the battlefield, for 
he was ready to go to jail for his principles, and to 
mock Emerson for remaining outside. As for his 
country, he loved the land too well to confuse it 
with the shifting territorial boundaries of the 
National State. In this, he had that vital regional 
consciousness which every New Englander shared: 
Hawthorne himself had said that New England was 
as large a piece of territory as could claim his alle- 
giance. Thoreau was not deceived by the rascality 
of politicians, who were ready to wage war for a 
coveted patch of Mexico’s land; nor did he side with 
those who, for the sake of the Union, were ready to 
give up the principles that alone had made the Union 
valuable. What he loved was the landscape, his 
friends, and his companions in the spirit: when the 
Political State presumed to exercise a brass coun- 
ter-claim on these loyalties it might go to the devil. 

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Thoreau’s attitude toward the State, one must 
note, was just the opposite to that of the progressive 
pioneer. The latter did not care what sort of land- 
scape he “located” in, so long as he could salute 
the flag of his country and cast his vote: Thoreau, 
on the contrary, was far too religious a man to com- 
mit the idolatry of saluting a symbol of secular 
power; and he realized that the affairs controlled by 
the vote represented only a small fraction of an 
interesting life, while so far from being indifferent 
to the land itself, he absorbed it, as men have ab- 
sorbed legends, and guarded it, as men preserve cere- 
monies. The things which his contemporaries took 
for the supreme realities of life, matter, money, and 
political rights, had only an instrumental use for 
Thoreau: they might contribute a little to the ar- 
rangement of a good life, but the good life itself was 
not contained, was not even implied in them. One 
might spend one’s life pursuing them without having 
lived. ‘There is not one of my readers,” he ex- 
claimed, “who has yet lived a whole human life.” 

In Thoreau’s time, industrialism had begun to 
puff itself up over its multiplication of goods and 
the increase of wants that it fostered, in order to 


provide the machine with an outlet for its ever-too- 


[113] 


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plentiful supply. Thoreau simply asked: “Shall we 


always study to obtain more of these things, and 
not sometimes be content with less?” “If we do not 
get our sleepers and forge rails and devote long days 
and nights to work,” he observed ironically, “but 
go tinkering with our lives to improve them, who 
will build the railroads?” Thoreau was not a 
penurious fanatic, who sought to practice bare liv- 
ing merely as a moral exercise: he wanted to obey 
Emerson’s dictum to save on the low levels and spend 
on the high ones. It is this that distinguishes him 
from the tedious people whose whole existence is ab- 
sorbed in the practice of living on beans, or breath- 
ing deeply, or wearing clothes of a vegetable origin: 
simplification did not lead in Thoreau to the cult of 
simplicity: it led to a higher civilization. 

What drove Thoreau to the solitude of the woods 
was no cynical contempt for the things beyond his 
reach. ‘Before we can adorn our houses with beau- 
tiful objects, the walls must be stripped, and our 
lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping 
and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a 
taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of 
doors, where there is no house, and no housekeeper.” 
The primeval woods were a favorable beginning for 
the search; but Thoreau did not think they could 

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be the end of it. The land itself, however, did stir 


his imagination; he wrote: 


All things invite this earth’s mhabitants 
To rear their lives to an unheard of height, 
And meet the expectation of the land. 


“The expectation of the land!” One comes upon 
that phrase, or its equivalent, in almost every valid 
piece of early American thought. One thinks of 
moorland pastures by the sea, dark with bayberries 
and sweet fern, breaking out among the lichened 
rocks; and the tidal rivers bringing their weedy tang 
to the low meadows, wide and open in the sun; the 
purple pine groves, where the needles, bedded deep, 
hum to the wind, or the knotted New England hills, 
where the mountain laurel in June seems like upland 
snow, left over, or where the marble breaks through 
into clusters of perpetual laurel and everlasting; 
one sees mountain lakes, giant aquamarines, sap- 
phires, topazes, and upland pastures where the blue, 
purple, lavender and green of the huckleberry bushes 
give way in autumn to the fringe of sumach by the 
roadside, volcanoes of reds and crimsons; the yel- 
low of September cornfields, with intenser pumpkins 
lying between the shocks, or the naked breasts and 


flanks of the autumn landscape, quivering in uneasy 


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sleep before the white blanket puts it to rest. To 
smell this, taste this, and feel and climb and walk 
over this landscape, once untouched, like an un- 
opened letter or a lover unkissed—who would not 
rise to meet the expectation of the land? Partly, 
it was the challenge of babyhood: how will it grow 
up and what will become of it? Partly, it was the 
charm of innocence; or again, it was the sense of the 
mighty variety that the whole continent gives, as if 
between the two oceans every possible human habitat 
might be built, and every conceivable variety of ex- 
perience fathomed. 

What the aboriginal Indian had absorbed from 
the young earth, Thoreau absorbed; what the new 
settlers had given her, the combing of the plow, 
the cincture of the stone fence or the row of planted 
elms, these things he absorbed too; for Thoreau, 
having tasted the settled life of Concord, knew that 
the wilderness was not a permanent home for man: 
one might go there for fortification, for a quicken- 
ing of the senses, for a tightening of all the muscles; 
but that, like any retreat, is a special exercise and 
wants a special occasion: one returned to Nature 
in order to become, in a deeper sense, more culti- 
vated and civilized, not in order to return to 
crudities that men had already discarded. Looking 

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ahead, Thoreau saw what was needed to preserve the 
valuable heritage of the American wilderness. He 
wrote: 

“The kings of England formerly had their forests 
to hold the king’s game, for sport or food, some- 
times destroying villages to create and extend them; 
and I think that they were impelled by a true 
instinct. Why should not we, who have renounced 
the king’s authority, have our national preserves, 
where no villages need be destroyed, in which the 
bear and panther, and some even of the hunter race, 
may still exist, and not be ‘civilized off the face of 
the earth,’-—our own forests, not to hold the king’s 
game merely, but to hold and preserve the king him- 
self also, the lord of creation,—and not in idle 
sport of food, but for inspiration and our own true 
recreation? or shall we, like the villains, grub them 
all up, poaching on our own national domain?” 

These pregnant suggestions of Thoreau, which 
were to be embodied only after two generations in 
our National and State Parks, and in projects like 
Mr. Benton Mackaye’s great conception of the 
Appalachian trail, make the comments of those who 
see in him only an arch-individualist, half-Diogenes, 
half-Rousseau, seem a little beside the point. ‘The 
individualism of an Emerson or a Thoreau was the 


[117] 


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necessary complement of the thoroughly socialized 
existence of the New England town; it was what 
prevented these towns from becoming collections of 
yes-men, with never an opinion or an emotion that 
differed from their neighbors. He wrote for his 
fellow-townsmen; and his notion of the good life 
was one that should carry to a higher pitch the 
existing polity and culture of Concord itself. ‘As 
the nobleman of cultivated taste surrounds himself 
with whatever conduces to his culture—genius— 
learning—wit—books—paintings—statuary—music 
philosophical instruments, and the like; so let the 
village do—not stop short at a pedagogue, a par- 
son, a sexton, a parish library, and three select- 
men, because our pilgrim forefathers got through a 
cold winter once on a bleak rock with these. To 
act collectively is according to the spirit of our 
institutions; and I am confident that, as our circum- 
stances are more flourishing, our means are greater 
than the nobleman’s.” Do not those sentences alter 
a little our stereotype of homespun New England, 
of Individualistic America? 

Just as Thoreau sought Nature, in order to arrive 
at a higher state of culture, so he practiced in- 
dividualism, in order to create a better order of 
society. ‘Taking America as it was, Thoreau con- 


[118] 


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ceived a form, a habitat, which would retain what 
was unique in the American contact with the virgin 
forest, the cultivated soil, and the renewed institu- 
tions of the New England town. He understood 
the precise thing that the pioneer lacked. The 
pioneer had exhausted himself in a senseless external 
activity, which answered no inner demands except 
those for oblivion. In his experiment at Walden 
Pond, Thoreau “learned this, at least . . . that if 
one advances confidently in the direction of his 
dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has 
imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in 
the common hours. . . . In proportion as he sim- 
plifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear 
less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor 
poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you 
have built castles in the air, your work need not be 
lost; that is where they should be. Now put the 
foundations under them.” 

In short, ‘Thoreau lived in his: desires; in rational 
and beautiful things that he imagined worth doing, 
and did. The pioneer lived only in extraneous neces- 
sities ; and he vanished with their satisfaction: filling 
all the conditions of his environment, he never ful- 
filled himself. With the same common ground be- 


tween them in their initial feeling towards Nature, 


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Thoreau and the pioneer stood at opposite corners 
of the field. What Thoreau left behind is still pre- 
cious; men may still go out and make over America 
in the image of Thoreau. What the pioneer left 
behind, alas! was only the burden of a vacant life. 


[1207 


Vv 
HIGH NOON 


“Hin that by me spreads a wider breast than my 
own proves the width of my own.” So Walt 
Whitman chanted in the Song of Myself; and in the 
greatness of Whitman the genius of Emerson was 
justified. Walt Whitman was a cosmos: he was 
inclusive where Emerson and Thoreau were restric- 
tive: he was sensual and jolly where they were refined 
and taut: he identified himself with the mere bulk 
and vastness of the American continent, and, with 
a tremendous appetite for the actual, entered into 
the experience of the pioneer, the roadhand, the 
mechanic, the woodman, the soldier, the farmer. In 
some remote Dutch ancestor of Whitman’s one figures 
the men and women of Franz Hals’s portraiture, 
people large, lusty, loving, men who like their sweet- 
heart and their steak, women who give themselves 
to love as the flower bows to the weight of the bee. 
With Emerson, to repeat the obvious, one surveys 


the world from a glacial summit: the air is rarefied, 


[1217 


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and at the distance even the treacherous places in 
the landscape seem orderly and innocent. With 
Whitman one sees the heights from the bosom of 
the valley: the “‘unseen is proved by the seen, till 
that becomes unseen, and receives proofs of its own.” 
Whitman absorbed so much of the America about 
him, that he is more than a single writer: he is 
almost a literature. Pushing his way like some 
larval creature through one husk after another, 
through the hard shell of Puritanism, in which he 
wrote Temperance Tracts, through the shell of 
republicanism in which he glorified all the new politi- 
cal institutions, through the flimsy casement of 
romantic poetry, iridescent with cheap colors and 
empty rhymes, Whitman finally achieved his own 
metamorphosis, and emerged, with dripping wings, 
into the untempered mid-day of the American scene. 
The stages of this metamorphosis have created con- 
tradictions in Whitman’s work; and if we are to 
appreciate his full achievement, we must be ready 
to throw aside the vestiges of his larval state. 
First, there was in Whitman a certain measure 
of the political religiosity of Joel Barlow and Philip 
Freneau. Political nationalism, in certain aspects 
of Whitman’s thought, assumed a mystical beauty 
and centrality: he wrote about the United States 
F122 ] 


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as if they were the tissue of men’s eternal desires— 
as if the robbery of Mexican territory, for example, 
could be justified to the Mexicans as well as the 
Americans by the inevitable drag of our Manifest 
Destiny. Here Whitman was confusing spiritual 
with temporal dominion. He had conceived new 
spiritual patterns, appropriate to the modern, 
which were to be fulfilled in the America of his 
dreams; and it was hard to resist identifying this 
hope of a wider America with the expansionist 
activities of political bandits. In this mood, to 
speak frankly, Whitman ranted. 

Nevertheless, when one sums up Whitman’s ob- 
servations upon the Union and upon the political 
state of the country, no one surely ever ranted with 
so many reservations; and it is unfair to take the 
bombastic lines out of the context that perpetually 
qualifies them. The political reality that was so 
precious to Whitman was only a means of permit- 
ting the growth of “superb persons,” and a life, 
“copious, vehement, spiritual, bold.” Moreover, be- 
tween the Walt Whitman who wrote the original 
Leaves of Grass, and the defeated and paralyzed 
man who lingered on through the Gilded Age, there 
is a difference; and by 1879 Whitman had come to 
realize that his democracy was one that had been 


[123 J 


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based on free land and equal opportunity to use it, 
and that failure was beginning to threaten the polit- 
ical structure. “If the United States,” he wrote, 
‘like the countries of the Old World, are also to 
grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, 
nomadic, miserably waged populations, such as we 
see looming upon us of late years—steadily, even if 
slowly, eating into them like a cancer of lungs or 
stomach—then our republican experiment, notwith- 
standing all its surface-successes, is at heart an 
unhealthy failure... .” That was not all. “By 
the unprecedented open-up of humanity enmasse in 
the United States in the last hundred years, under 
our institutions, not only the good qualities of the 
race, but just as much the bad ones, are prominently 
brought forward. Man is about the same, in the 
main, whether with despotism or whether with free- 
dom.” 

That saving and irrefragable common sense was 
what ballasted all of Whitman’s hopes and expecta- 
tions. He lived to see the America he dreamed of 
undermined and rotten: he saw the Kings of Iron 
and Oil and Cotton supplant not merely the older 
ones who ruled by divine right but the new one 
elected quadrennially by the people: he saw the 
diverse but well-mixed America of his youth give way 


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to the America of the melting pot, which neither 
welded the old nationalities nor had the spiritual 
power to create a new one: he saw the sickly barbers 
and perfumers of the New York literary schools of 
the forties turn into the gentlemanly tailors who 
cut their stories and their thoughts to fit the fat 
paunches of the middle classes in the seventies: he 
saw all this, and denied nothing. No critic ferreted 
out the weaknesses and pettinesses of America with 
a surer nose than Whitman tracked them down in 
his Democratic Vistas: what could be said against 
his dream, Whitman said, with the staunch candor 
of a friend. But his thought and his vision were 
unshaken; the promise of America had not dis- 
appeared. If it was absent from the immediate 
scene, it had nevertheless taken form in his poems; 
and his poems were still waiting to shape a new 
America. 

In Leaves of Grass Whitman had fulfilled Emerson 
in more ways than either of them suspected. There 
are passages of Emerson’s prose which have, poten- 
tially, the prosody of Whitman; but whereas Emer- 
son’s poems, at their best, remain fragmentary and 
broken, because the meaning was somehow always 
warping the metes and measures Emerson respected 


and clung to, in Whitman, at his best, these new 


[ 125 ] 


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thoughts find their own beat, and become poetry of 
the first rank. Whitman had discovered Emerson’s 
inner form in creating his own. He himself had 
stammered and stuttered so long as he kept to the 
old metres: his early work was weak and sentimental 
because he had nothing to say within the bounds of 
those previous culture-molds which Whitman tagged 
as “feudal.” New streams of thought and experi- 
ence were confluent in Whitman: the Weltanschauung 
of Hegel, precursor of the evolutionists, who saw 
the world as a continual becoming, and both the 
bad and the good as part of the total meaning of 
the universe; the electric doctrine of Emerson, which 
bade every man find his own center and every insti- 
tution to answer up for its results in one’s own life; 
the unstratified society of America, where the bus 
driver was as good as the next man, and the private - 
soldier as great as the statesman whose policies 
reduced him to a pawn; the cleansing operations of 
science, which confronted every variety in thought, 
and made no more distinction between the clean and 
the unclean, the minute and the immense, than some 
indifferent deity, for whom the fall of a gnat and 
the fall of an Empire are of precisely the same im- 
portance. Out of the discussions of the Fourierists, 


and the societies of Free Lovers, and women who 


[126] 


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pressed for the political and social emancipation of 
their sex, as well as out of his own capacious adven- 
tures, Whitman got the courage to deal with the 
varieties of sexual experience, too: in the Children 
of Adam and Calamus he brushed past the nice 
restraints of Emerson—who “held his nose” at its 
passages—and Thoreau, who, like Natty Bumpo 
and Paul Bunyan, averted himself from any passion 
more intense than friendship. 

Whitman took in the quaker, the puritan, the cos- 
mopolitan, the pioneer, the republican; and what 
came out in his poems was none of these things: it 
was a new essence; none of the ordinary labels 
described it. It had the smell of reality which was 
science; it had the largeness of comprehension 
which was philosophy ; and it had the doubts, search- 
ings, quests, achievements, and consummations which 
are the stuff of life itself. Whitman found no need 
to add an extra dimension to his experience: to 
transcribe for him was in the highest sense to 
translate. Whatever tended to create full-bodied 
and full-minded men and women tended toward en- 
larging the significance of every single activity, no 
matter how base or minute. The veil of appearance 
was as mysterious and beautiful as anything behind 


the veil. Perhaps it was all Maya, all illusion; or 


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perhaps life was like a set of Chinese boxes: one 
removed the outer box of appearance, and discovered 
another box—appearance. What of it? A single 
blade of grass was enough to confound all the — 
atheists; and whatever else the universe might hold, 
he reckoned that there was no sweeter meat than 
that which clung to his own bones. Such faith does 
not need external props and certitudes: it mocks at 
the testimony of bibles, for it is itself the source of 
such testimony. 

People have hesitated to call Whitman’s poems 
poetry; it is useless to deny that they belong to 
sacred literature. If the Leaves of Grass are not 
poetry, it is only because not every generation 
endows us with such a poet. 


VI 


Literature may be evocative or formative! one 
plays upon sentiments, emotions, ideas that already 
exist : the other changes the very attitude of the audi- 
ence, and calls new ones forth. The common Amer- 
ican of the Golden Day responded to Longfellow 
and Whittier; for these men caught his ordinary 
mood, measured off and rhymed; and even when 


Whittier and Lowell wrote on abolition themes, they 
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were only touching strings which a Garrison or a 
Wendell Phillips had already set in motion. It is 
amusing to note the way in which ante-bellum Amer- 
ica responded to Whitman. Emerson and Thoreau 
were quick to see his genius, even to proclaim it. 
Lesser people, however, like Moncure Conway, were 
a little disappointed in him: they expected to find 
in Whitman the common workman, grown vocal, 
some one who could be taken into society and 
patronized; some one who would bolster up their 
notion of a poet who had risen from the lowly ranks. 

Whitman was not a democrat, in the sense of 
being a popular mediocrity ; he was a man of genius; 
who, mid all his school teaching, editing, carpenter- 
ing, type-setting and what-not remained consecrated 
to the profession of letters: Jesus Son of Sirach was 
no more certain of his vocation. Whitman was 
Pygmalion to his own Galatea: he had formed him- 
self, so that he might give a new model to America. 
The imperturbable landscape, the satisfaction and 
aplomb of animals, the ecstasy of hearty lovers, the 
meditations of one who sits withdrawn in the crowd, 
or on a mountain top—Whitman extracted from 
these things a new shape, which was himself. Every 
poem of Whitman’s is the man; every part of the 
man threw forth tendrils which clung to the objects 

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of poems. One could not become a sympathetic 
reader of Whitman without re-forming oneself 
into an approximation of this new shape. Only 
commonplace works of art reflect the everyday 
personality of the reader: the supreme works always 
show or hint of the new shape the reader .may 
become: they are prophetic, formative. One might 
remove Longfellow without changing a single pos- 
sibility of American life; had Whitman died in the 
cradle, however, the possibilities of American life 
would have been definitely impoverished. He 
created a new pattern of experience and character. 
The work he conceived still remains to be done: the 
America he evoked does not as yet exist. 

Whitman was a poet in the braid Scots sense of 
makkar: a maker or creator. He was conscious of 
the fact that the accumulated culture of Europe 
had lost a good part of its original meaning, through 
lack of direct contact with the new forces of dis- 
covery, science, democracy: the work of the old 
makkars was crumbling away; at best, it was re- 
peated by rote, as in the churches, without any 
sense of the living reality, or the finer passages 
were rolled on the tongue, for sensation’s sake, by 
an aristocratic minority. “Note to-day,” Whitman 
observed in Democratic Vistas, “a curious spectacle 


[130] 


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and conflict. . . . Science, testing absolutely all 
thoughts, all works, has already burst well upon the 
world—a sun, mounting, most illuminating, most 
glorious, surely never again to set. But against it, 
deeply entrenched, holding possession, yet remains 
(not only through the churches and schools but by 
imaginative literature and unregenerate poetry) the 
fossil theology of the mythic-materialistic super- 
stitious, untaught and credulous, fable-loving primi- 
tive ages of humanity.” 

Whitman saw that the office of sacred literature 
was no longer being performed; or at all events, 
that those who were pursuing it were not fully con- 
scious of either the need or the opportunity. 
Vulgar literature was, indeed, growing hugely. 
“To-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers, espe- 
cially novelists, success (so-called) is for him or 
her who strikes the mean flat average, the sensational 
appetite for stimulus, incident, persiflage, etc., and 
depicts to the common caliber, sensual, exterior life.” 
What remained of sacred literature was insufficient 
to offset this. It was to establish a central point in 
literature, in terms of science and the modern, that 
Whitman created: American poetry was to do in 
our day what the Vedas, the Nackas, the Talmud, 
the Old Testament, the Gospel, Plato’s works had 


[131] 


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done for their time: it was to crystallize our most 
precious experience and in turn to modify, by that 
act of crystallization, the daily routine. 

What, in fact, were the active formative litera- 
tures when Whitman wrote? In the Western World 
the principal one was, without doubt, that great 
miscellany called the Old Testament, supplemented 
by the gospels; and among the cultivated classes, 
Homer, Horace, Plutarch, Dante, Shakespeare, 
Corneille, played a lively but minor part. The 
Romantic movement, which went back to the ballads 
and the folk-literature of the various regions of 
Europe was a recognition of the fact that something 
was lacking in both the Hebrew and the classic tra- 
ditions, and in the literature which was directly 
founded upon them. What was lacking was the 
direct historic connection with a people, a place, 
and a special way of life. It is true that all 
literature has certain common characters, and no 
great works of the spirit are foreign and remote; 
but, as Whitman pointed out, “something is rooted 
in the invisible roots, the profoundest meanings, of 
a place, race, or nationality,” and the, Romantic 
movement had cut loose from classic and Hebraic 
influences in order to absorb this more intimate 


order of meaning and find a nearer and fresher 


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source of spiritual activity. Blake, Keats, Shelley, 
had partly achieved this; Wordsworth alone, how- 
ever, had created new forms without relying on a 
mythic-materialistic past. 

With what was universal in all these efforts, 
Whitman could sympathize: Homer and Shake- 
speare and the Bible had been his daily food. He 
sought to do for common men and women, for the 
contemporary and the ordinary-heroic, what Shake- 
speare had achieved in his great images of the 
aristocratic life. In America, in modern life, on 
the farm and in the laboratory, in the progress of 
souls along the grand roads of the Universe, in 
company with the Great Companions, the swift and 
majestic men, the capacious and broad-bosomed 
women—here was the stuff for new Vedas, Cycles, 
and Testaments. Whitman overvalued, if anything, 
the contrivances of political democracy; but that 
was only a first step; he overcountenanced, if any- 
thing, the absorption of America in materialistic 
effort; that, however, was only the second step. 
Neither political democracy nor industrial progress 
was for him anything,but a prelude to the third 
stage, rising out of the two previous ones, and creat- 
ing a “native expression spirit” and an abundance of 


rich personalities. 


[ 183] 


The Golden Day 
In his effort to keep ballasted and always find a 


landing place in contemporary existence, Whitman 
was perhaps too receptive and undiscriminating in 
his acknowledgement of current values and aims; in 
his old age, he accepted with child-like delight the 
evidences of material prosperity he found on his 
Western trip. His Hegelianism was dangerous 
stuff: it led him to identify the Real and the Ideal, 
instead of seeing, as William James put it, that they 
were dynamically continuous. But at the core, 
Whitman was never deceived: he knew that the 
meaning of all current activity lay only in the 
forms or symbols it created and the rational pur- 
poses it embodied; and so far from believing that 
the work of the poet or artist would be supplanted 
by science, he believed that “the highest and subtlest 
and broadest truths of modern science wait for their 
true assignment and last vivid flashes of light—as 
Democracy waits for its—through first-class meta- 
physicians and speculative philosophs—laying the 
basements and foundations for these new, more 
expanded, more harmonious, more melodious, freer 
American poems.” ‘To indicate these new meanings, 
to open up these new relationships, Whitman wrote 
his poems. I can think of no one in whom the un- 


conscious and the conscious process worked more in 


[184] 


The Golden Day 


harmony: the life and the doctrine were one. So 
far as Whitman went, he achieved his end. 

So far as he went! Most people are unaware that 
the Leaves of Grass, Calamus, the Children of Adam, 
are only a part of the vast canvas he projected; 
they do not realize that he was diverted from his 
original intention and never lived to complete it. 
The Leaves of Grass were to deal chiefly with the 
palpable and the material; there was to be a com- 
plementary volume which would center mainly on the 
spiritual and the inactual—upon death and immor- 
tality and final meanings—for he was the poet of 
the body and he was the poet of the soul. Alas! 
the Civil War came. He threw himself into it as 
a hospital visitor, giving his personality and his 
radiant health to the sick and the wounded, as these 
men had given themselves in the camp and on the 
battlefield. Within a few years this ordeal exacted 
its revenge: he became paralyzed, and as he never 
fully recovered his physical powers, his mental 
powers diminished, too: if they are still at their 
summit in Drum-Taps, they recurred only fitfully 
in the later poems: and though he could outline his 
aspiration with a firm hand in Democratic Vistas, 
published in 1871, he could no longer model it and 
round it out. What he meant to create is implied 


[135] 


The Golden Day 


in all his poems; the whole of it was never, perhaps, 
expressed. 

Whitman himself had felt that the War for the 
American Union was the Odyssey of his generation; 
but except for himself and Herman Melville, no one 
lived to write about it in those terms; the stories of 
Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Upton Sinclair 
did not treat it in this vein. Whitman did not see 
that the great conflict might have a Punic ending. 
As it turned out, the war was a struggle between 
two forms of servitude, the slave and the machine. 
The machine won, and the human spirit was almost 
as much paralyzed by the victory as it would have 
been by the defeat. An industrial transformation 
took place over night: machines were applied to 
agriculture; they produced new guns and arma- 
ments ; the factory regime, growing tumultuously in 
the Eastern cities, steadily undermined the bal- 
anced regimen of agriculture and industry which 
characterized the East before the war. 

The machines won; and the war kept on. Its 
casualties were not always buried at Antietam or 
Gettysburg; they moldered, too, in libraries, studies, 
offices. The justifiable ante-bellum optimism of 
Emerson turned into a waxen smile. Whitman lost 


his full powers in what should have been his prime. 


[136] 


The Golden Day 


Among the young men, many a corpse was left, to 
go through the routine of living. But before the 
Golden Day was over, the American mind had lived 
through a somber and beautiful hour, the hour of 
Hawthorne and Melville. With them, the sun 
turned to a candle, and cast black shadows upon 
the wall, not the empty grotesque shadows of Poe, 
but the shapes of a magnified if distorted humanity. 


LAL B87 | 


VII 
TWILIGHT 


HawrnHorne was the afterglow of the Seventeenth 
Century. With him came the twilight of Puritanism 
as a spiritual force. Presently, it became altogether 
a handy servant of industry, and as a system of 
ideas, ceased to be interesting or to attract inter- 
esting minds. Men like Josiah Royce, born some 
fifty years after Hawthorne, became, in the jargon 
of philosophy, absolute idealists; those who did 
not take this path, flourished in negations. Puritan- 
ism left its mark on America after the Civil War 
chiefly through its code of inhibitions and avoid- - 
ances; in this sense, it is still with us. In Haw- 
thorne, however, the conviction which produced a 
Paradise Lost or a Pilgrim’s Progress still glowed 
with a white intensity; but its heat was gone. Haw- 
thorne was silver; the silver of moonlight; the silver 
of fine goblets; the tarnished silver of ancient and 
abandoned houses, locked in moldy drawers. 


Hawthorne was no longer frightened by the 
[188] 


The Golden Day 


bogies of the Puritan hell; but his interest in human 
weakness and its consequences remained: he was an 
esthetician of sin. Into the shadows of Seventeenth 
Century New England, with a consciousness that 
remained outwardly Puritan, he projected the fig- 
ures of his own day. One does not perhaps recognize 
in the Scarlet Letter and in The House of the Seven 
Gables the torments of the modern consciousness; 
but they are there. Pull off the costumes and look 
closely at these Hesters and Hepzibahs: they are 
sisters of the Annas and Nastasyas that the great 
Russians are portraying. Did you think that the 
Scarlet Letter was placed upon the waxen breast of 
a dummy? Do not be deceived. The flesh is tender, 
and the heart beats. The characters in Hawthorne’s 
principal tragedy were both symbolic and real: 
Chillingworth was a vengeful, impotent old man: 
he was also a deterministic Puritanism, caught 
within its materialist circle, and unable to take pos- 
session of life, to which it had been too lately and 
grudgingly wedded. The young minister was a 
sweet, neurotic soul, impotent through conflict, 
where Chillingworth was impotent through denial: 
he was the prototype of the Ruskins and Amiels who 
haunted the century: he was likewise the figure of a 
weak and spindly idealism which faints at the first 
[139] 


The Golden Day 


warm breath of reality, and dare not acknowledge 
the child it has begotten. Hester need not forfeit 
her own existence to become the creative spirit itself, 
breaking away from the Puritanic bond, unsatisfied 
by the temporary union with Transcendentalism— 
it did not take Hawthorne long to discover the in- 
sufficiency of Brook Farm—and living out, with a 
single child, a destiny without husband or lover. 

I have perhaps read too freely into the fable: 
Hawthorne himself had no such conscious purpose 
as that I have been trying to explicate: but the novel 
will bear pondering: it is no mere study of the 
external rigors of an abandoned creed. If I err, 
I am absurd in the same way that Hawthorne him- 
self was, when he made a note of a gas main that lay 
beneath a whole city, and wondered whether it might 
not be made the symbol of some widespread but 
secret evil. At heart, the American novelists were 
all transcendental. The scene was a symbol: they 
scarcely had the patience to describe it: they were 
interested in it only because it pointed to something 
more important. Even Poe, who sneered at Con- 
cord, was equally an imaginative Transcendentalist : 
Mardi and the Fall of the House of Usher, and the 


Scarlet Letter were all of one brood. These writers 


[ 140 ] 


The Golden Day 


were lost in the inactual: sin, death, eternity—these 
held their minds, not “chops and tomato sauce”! 

There is a tragic moment in all experience, which 
good health cannot overcome, which good institu- 
tions cannot avert. Hawthorne was conscious of 
this inescapable thread of evil, and delighted in the 
complicated arabesque it presents to the mind when 
traced over the whole tapestry of existence. Some- 
times the evil appeared to him as heredity, as it does 
with the Jews; sometimes it is fate, more dumb and 
irremediable—a life which has not faced this lurking 
and inscrutable malevolence has only made a childish 
reckoning of its possibilities. Hawthorne followed 
its last intricacy with the patience of a physiologist 
lingering over a microscopic slide of morbid tissue. 
What could the professional optimists make of this 
doctrine? Was it not just the clammy perspiration 
left on the walls of old New England buildings? 
Would it not be removed by central heating, a fresh 
coat of paint, or some other external improvement? 
Who could believe that life presented inherent evils 
which no inechanical improvements would diminish: 
who dared to believe this as long as the population 
of New Eden doubled every five years, and real- 
estate values kept going up? 

The possibilities of tragic experience in America 


[141 7] 


The Golden Day 


were passing away, even when Hawthorne was writ- 
ing. There was no tragedy in the program of the 
pioneer and the industrialist: there was just suc- 
cess or disappointment, whereas tragedy shows the 
-canker that rots success, and the depth of a sorrow 
that belittles disappointment; doing so, it summons 
up that greatness of spirit in which Hester, for 
example, faces life, once her most painful part has 
been acted out. There is no surer test of the quality 
of life in what I have called the Golden Day, than 
the two tragedies, The Scarlet Letter and Moby 
Dick, which issued out of it. The sunlight had in 
Emerson and Whitman penetrated to every spot, 
and in its presence, the dark corners became more 
intense. If one explored the white summits of the 
glacier with Emerson, one might also fall into the 
abyss with Melville. One climbed high; and when 
one fell, the fall was deep. | 


Vil 


The waters that unite the continents of the world 
once meant more to the thin strip of communities 
that lined that Atlantic coast than the prairies 
where the buffalo wandered. Sloops and catboats 
plied the inlets and the rivers, bungs and schooners 


[142 ] 


The Golden Day 


went up and down the coast; and at last, after a 
hundred years of boat-building, the clipper-ship, 
designed in the shipyards of New York and Boston 
and Newburyport and Portland, began to scud 
dangerously over the seas, carrying ice cut during 
the winter on Walden Pond or Fresh Pond to cool 
the merchant of Calcutta, picking up cargoes of 
teas and silks, or venturing out from Long Island 
or New Bedford, to stay years on the water in pur- 
suit of the whale. 

A lad leaves his schoolmates, and at twenty navi- 
gates his father’s ship; a girl sails with her husband, 
nurses him during a difficult illness, and brings the 
ship safely to port, making all the reckonings her- 
self; in the long watches, as the ship sails on even 
keel, the mind is open to new thoughts and fresh 
insights: Morse invents his telegraph aboard ship, 
and Colt makes a wooden model of the deadly 
revolver: those who are more reflective than ingen- 
ious mix their thoughts with adventure and der- 
ring-do: a ship opens the mind of a young lawyer 
named Dana, and it never opens so satisfactorily 
again: life on board ship is the beginning of Henry 
George’s intellectual adventure. 

Every year these quiet inlets launched their ships ; 
the clipper was the supreme esthetic achievement of 


[ 143 ] 


The Golden Day 
the day and land, better by far than current archi- 


tecture or painting; and, unlike the covered wagon, 
these vessels returned. On board and in port, the 
beauty and brutality of the life mingled, the strength 
and the arrogance and the hardness and whipcord 
skill, the bullying, the petty meanness, the greed, the 
concupiscence, the fierce press of work in a storm 
contrasted with the occasions of sweet profound 
apathy, the immensity of quiet nights under the 
stars, and the hot pressure of strange courtesans, 
flagrant with perfumes, in the little houses one might 
stumble upon in the bazaars of Colombo or Canton. 
Put all this over against the measured, fussy life of 
New York or Baltimore, respectable, sensible, at 
bottom banal and sordid. Such heights and such 
depths! He who had touched them knew too well 
that no mean could be golden! 

Herman Melville, born in New York in the same 
year as Whitman, mixed of the same Dutch-English 
stock, dying, too, within a year of Whitman, 
Herman Melville turned to the sea, and, in the great 
age of our seamanship, tasted for himself the quali- 
ties of both Odysseus and Homer. From his personal 
adventures, after he had jumped ship in the South 
Seas, he wrote that fine idyll of the tropics called 
Typee. Face to face with the savages of the 

[144] 


The Golden Day 


Marquesas, he discovered that in mere joyousness 
of life, civilization had nothing to endow a man with 
that these ferocious and innocent cannibals did not 
possess: on the contrary, considered merely as ani- 
mal existence, there was a more beautiful and 
exuberant animality in the savage state than in the 
hard pragmatic routine of our urban money- 
warrens. While he stuck to the sea, the whaler, the 
merchantman, and the man-of-war each made their 
contribution to Melville. Finally, at the age of 
thirty, he gathered himself for a great effort: the 
result was the epic poem called Moby Dick. 

The quality of Moby Dick and the fate of Moby 
Dick throw an interesting light upon the cast of 
mind that characterized the age. After the usual 
brief success Melville’s books almost all enjoyed, it 
was tossed aside, to eke out an existence as a boy’s 
book of adventure. Swift’s satire had met the same 
fate, and for the same reason: adults who wish to 
prolong their infantile state turn books like this 
over to children upon whom the deeper fable can 
make no impression, whilst they themselves take com- 
fort in books that are written out of a more puerile 
consciousness. ‘That Moby Dick was not recognized, 
except here and there by an isolated critic, as a 
great book, is due to the fact, I think, that Moby 

[145] 


The Golden Day 
Dick is poetry. The jolly and comfortable bour- 


geois tradition of the Victorian age, a state of mind 
composed of felt slippers and warm bellywash, could 
not produce such a work: the genius of its great 
writers, its Dickenses and Thackerays, was of quite 
another cut. To find a parallel for Moby Dick one 
must go back to Dekker, Heywood, Webster, Mar- 
lowe, and Thomas Browne; men who translated the 
drab events of the outer life into a wild and passion- 
ate dialect of their own. These are the kin of Mel- 
ville. His prose, too, had the richness of the early 
Seventeenth Century, capable of great rhythms, 
always ready to float easily off the sandbars of com- 
monplace description and out onto the rolling waters 
of the grand style. In Whitman and Melville letters 
again became as racy as the jabber of a waterside 
saloon; in all of Poe’s poetry there is scarcely a line 
as good as pages of the best of Melville’s prose. 
Moby Dick was not merely poetry; it was a prod- 
uct of that deep meditation on the world and life and 
time which makes philosophy; and among the treas- 
ures of the book is a single paragraph which might 
claim a place beside whole treatises on the central 
problems of destiny, fate, free-will. I cannot for- 
bear putting it down. It takes rise from an after- 


noon on which Melville was calmly performing one 


[ 146 ] 


The Golden Day 


of the routine functions of the ship, the making of a 
mat. 

“As I kept on passing and repassing the filling 
or woof of marline between the long yarns of the 
warp, using my hand for the shuttle . . . it seemed 
as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were 
a shuttle mechanically weaving away at the Fates. 
There lay the fixed threads of the warp subject to 
but one single, ever-returning, unceasing vibration, 
and that vibration merely enough to admit of the 
crosswise interbinding of other threads with its own. 
The warp seemed necessity, and here, thought I, 
with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave 
my own destiny into these unalterable threads. 
Meantime, Queequeeg’s impulsive, indifferent sword, 
sometimes hitting the woof slantingly, or crookedly, 
or strongly, or weakly, as the case might be; and 
by this difference in the concluding blow producing 
a corresponding contrast in the final aspect of the 
completed fabric; this savage’s sword, thought I, 
which thus finally shapes and fashions both warp and 
woof ; this easy, indifferent sword must be chance— 
aye, chance, free will, and necessity—nowise in- 
compatible—all interweavingly working together. 
The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved 


from its ultimate course—its ever alternating vibra- 


r 147 | 


The Golden Day 


tion, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free 
to ply the shuttle between given threads; and chance, 
though restricted in its play within the right lines 
of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by 
free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance 
by turn rules either, and has the last featuring blow 
at events.” 

If this generation did not produce any skilled pro- 
fessional philosophers, I am not sure that it alto- 
gether lacked the living stuff of philosophy. 

Melville, who was a friend and neighbor of 
Hawthorne in the Berkshires, once wrote into an 
enthusiastic description of Hawthorne’s work a true 
picture of his own. “There is a certain tragic phase 
of humanity which, in our opinion, was never more 
powerfully embodied than by Hawthorne. We mean 
the tragedies of human thought in its own unbiased, 
native, and profounder working. We think that in 
no recorded mind has the intense feeling of the use- 
able truth ever entered more deeply than into this 
man’s by useable truth we mean the apprehension 
of the absolute condition of present things as they 
strike the eye of the man who fears them not, though 
they do their worst to him,—the man who... de- 
clares himself a sovereign nature in himself, amid the 
powers of heaven, hell, and earth. He may perish 


[ 148] 


The Golden Day 


but so long as he exists he insists upon treating with 
all powers upon an equal basis.” 

The absolute condition of present things was 
what Melville sought to track down in the fable and 
the myth of the White Whale. One may read Moby 
Dick as a story of the sea, and be irritated by the 
lengthy description of whales and whaling; one may 
read it as a treatise on the whaling industry, and be 
irritated by the irrelevant heroic figure of Ahab, or 
the innocent sinister beauty of Queequeeg; and since 
it is also this, one may read it as an epic of the 
human spirit, and discover an equivalent of its sym- 
bolism in one’s own consciousness. For me, the 
Whale is Nature, the Nature man warily hunts and 
subdues, the Nature he captures, tethers to his ship, 
cuts apart, scientifically analyzes, melts down, uses 
for light and nourishment, sells in the market, the 
Nature that serves man’s purposes so long as he 
uses his wits and can ride on top. But with all this 
easy adventuring, there is another and deadlier Na- 
ture—the White Whale—a Nature that threatens 
man and calls forth all his heroic powers, and in 
the end defeats him with a final lash of the tail. 
That part of Nature cannot be harpooned, cannot be 
captured, still less drawn and quartered and sold. 
In sheer savagery—or was it perhaps in play?— 


[ 149 7] 


The Golden Day 


the White Whale had once amputated Ahab’s leg: 
with relentless vigilance Ahab follows the White 
Whale to its lair, impatient of baser catches on the 
way, as the great philosophers and poets have been 
impatient of the little harpoonings and dickerings 
of science and the practical life. The White Whale 
is not the kindly, milk-fed Absolute, in which all con- 
flicts are reconciled and all contradictions united 
into a higher kind of knowledge; no, the White 
Whale is the sheer brute energy of the universe, which 
challenges and checks the spirit of man. It is only 
the lonely heroic spirit, who declares himself a sov- 
erelgn nature, that dares follow the White Whale; 
and once he comes to close quarters with the crea- 
ture, there is no issue but death. The White Whale 
is the external force of Nature and Destiny. In 
the end it conquers: it must conquer: until the spirit 
of man is itself Leviathan, and can meet its antago- 
nist on even terms. 

In Moby Dick Melville carried the private voyage 
of the soul to its inevitable conclusion. Men are 
sustained, in faith and work, not by what they find 
in the universe, but by what man has built there. 
Man gave the word: he gave the symbol: he gave the 
form: he believed in his ejaculations and created 
language; he believed in his forms and wrought 


[ 150 ] 


The Golden Day 


cities: he believed in his symbols, and created myth, 
poetry, science, philosophy. Deny this initial act 
of faith, tear aside the veil man has thrown between 
his own experience and the blank reality of the uni- 
verse and everything else becomes meaningless: de- 
pend upon one’s private self alone and though the 
renunciation be heroic, the result is inevitable: the 
White Whale will swallow one at a gulp. To appre- 
ciate the reality of the White Whale is to see more 
deeply into the expedience of all our intermediate 
institutions, all the spiritual shelters man puts be- 
tween himself and the uncertain cosmic weather. 
Meaning, significance, attends only that little part 
of the universe man has built up and settled; the 
South Sea Islander, in his lazy and primitive cul- 
ture, had achieved this meaning and lived happily; 
Melville, having divested himself of the meanings 
man had wrought and faced the universe as a sov- 
ereign power was confronted by a blank: he peered 
behind the curtain, and heard the dim rattle of his 
breath echoing through the abyss: nothing was 
there! So far can the spirit go by itself; no farther. 
If it returns at all, it is back to the common life. 
On the imaginative level of Moby Dick Melville 
never again walked: he had exhausted himself. In 
his short-stories, he pictured himself more than once 


[151] 


The Golden Day 


as an old man; and at thirty he was already that. 
There are tortured fragments of Melville in Mardi 
and Pierre; but the depth and bottom of the man 
had been sounded in Moby Dick. From that time 
on he lived in a sort of mechanical dream. His mar- 
riage, his wandering through the Near East, his in- 
terest in the Civil War—none of these could heal 
his spirit. He succumbed to rheumatism and the 
burden of supporting his family; the greater part 
of his manhood he clung tenaciously, like a ghost 
rattling his chains, to the post in the Customs House 
at Gansevoort Street. Fame, ambitions, friends, 
travel, love, nothing was left him in all this; he had 
exhausted their possibilities before he was thirty- 
five. 

For thirty years Melville was like the dead man 
of Poe’s, whose processes of decomposition were 
halted. He died twice: nothing in the drab and 
dapper America after the Civil War could recall him 
to the advantages of an earthly existence. The 
forms and activities of the new day—what were 
they? Could he look upon Howells as his son; could 
he treat Mark Twain as an equal? “Life,” Haw- 
thorne had written, “is made up of marble and mud.” 
Melville, who had so superbly shaped the marble, 
was unable to do anything with the mud, or rather, 


[152] 


The Golden Day 


he let the mud overwhelm him, and sank into it 
deeper and deeper. ‘The American had faced the 
tragedy of the White Whale. He was now to retire 
to nearer and shallower waters. Emerson, Thoreau, 
Whitman, Melville, yes, and Hawthorne had an- 
swered the challenge of American experience. Pres- 
ently, their heroic words will be forgotten, and their 
successors, living corpses, too, will look back to the 
days of their youth, as to a dream, real only while 
it lasted. 


[153] 





CHAPTER FOUR 


THE PRAGMATIC ACQUIESCENCE 





I 


Tue Civil War arose in a mess of muddy issues. 
The abolitionists’ attack upon slavery, full of moral 
righteousness and oblivious to the new varieties of 
slavery that were being practiced under industrial- 
ism, stiffened the South into a spasm even more self- 
righteous, even more blind. Twenty years of fierce 
debate found the Southerner frequently denying that 
the Negro was a human being: it also found the 
abolitionist denying that the slaveholder was a 
human being. In that temper, all the rational hu- 
mane people who were searching for effective meas- 
ures to reduce the area of slavery and pension off 
the institution found their hands tied and their 
throats throttled. The South fought to preserve 
slavery by extending its territory: the answer to this 
was natural: and then, to muddle matters worse, the 
issue was mixed up with Centralism versus State’s 
Rights. There were honest abolitionists who desired 
that the Union should break up into a Slave State 
and a Free State which would serve as a biblical city 


[1577] 


The Golden Day 


of refuge; there were slavery men who were reluctant 
to see the Union destroyed. 

The smoke of warfare blinded the issue further. 
When it cleared away, the slave question had dis- 
appeared but the “Negro question” remained; and 
in the inevitable dictatorship of war, the central gov- 
ernment, particularly the Executive, emerged, mys- 
tically raising aloft the Union as a mask for all its 
depredations. What the office-holders in the central 
government called “the menace of sectionalism,” and 
what we may call equally “the promise of regional- 
ism” was exterminated for fully two generations. 
Local life declined. The financial centers grew: 
through the mechanism of finance, New York and 
Chicago began to dominate the rest of the country. 
Presently the novel of “local color” appeared—proof 
enough that the color had washed out. 

The Civil War cut a white gash through the his- 
tory of the country; it dramatized in a stroke the 
changes that had begun to take place during the 
preceding twenty or thirty years. On one side lay 
the Golden Day, the period of an Elizabethan daring 
on the sea, of a well-balanced adjustment of farm 
and factory in the East, of a thriving regional cul- 
ture, operating through the lecture-lyceum and the 

[158 ] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


provincial college; an age in which the American 
mind had flourished and had begun to find itself. 
When the curtain rose on the post-bellum scene, this 
old America was for all practical purposes demol- 
ished: industrialism had entered overnight, had 
transformed the practices of agriculture, had en- 
couraged a mad exploitation of mineral oil, natural 
gas, and coal, and had made the unscrupulous master 
of finance, fat with war-profits, the central figure 
of the situation. All the crude practices of British 
paleotechnic industry appeared on the new scene 
without relief or mitigation. 

On both sides of the line many a fine lad had died 
in battle, and those who survived, in more subtle 
ways died, too. Some of them had evaded the op- 
portunity for physical death: Mark Twain, after a 
brief anomalous period in the army, ran away to 
Nevada, William Dean Howells accepted a consular 
post in Venice, Stanley Hall, honest enough to re- 
cord the point in his autobiography, accepted the 
services of a paid substitute. Happy the dead! The 
period after the war was the Gilded Age, with a 
vengeance. Sidney Lanier, who had served the 
South, and emerged a skeleton, faced the bitter truth 


of this great outburst of material enterprise: 


[159] 


The Golden Day 


“Trade is trade but sings a lie: 


°Tis only war grown miserly.” 


Unchecked, unmodified, industrialism controlled 
the mind as well as the material apparatus of the 
country: men who had a cut for scholarship, like 
Charles Francis Adams, became railroad magnates, 
and the son of the Great Emancipator became the 
head of the Pullman Corporation. H. G. Eastman 
founded the business school in 1855, and by the end 
of the war that which was established in Poughkeep- 
sie had more than a thousand pupils. The Massa- 
chusetts Institute of Technology was established in 
1861 and dedicated to the practical application of 
science in the arts, agriculture, manufacture and 
commerce; when it was opened in 1865 the courses 
on industrial technology dominated the whole pro- 
gram. The multiplication of these institutes wit- 
nessed the new orientation in industry and life. 
‘‘We do not properly live in these days,” one of the 
early Transcendentalists, J. S. Dwight, had written, 
“but everywhere, with patent inventions and com- 
plex arrangements, are getting ready to live. The 
end is lost in the means, life 1s smothered in appli- 
ances.” 'The Gilded Age accepted these facts with 
complacence: business was the only activity it re- 


[1601 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


spected; comfort was the only result it sought. 
Gone were the tragic doubts that had vexed the 
Transcendentalist and made life interesting and ter- 
rible and very beautiful for all the sensitive minds: 
the steel mill, the mine, the counting house, claimed 
them; or if not that, they went to an equally ma- 
terialist post-war Germany, dominated by Bismarck 
and Krupp, and specialized in their Fach, as they 
might specialize in railroad securities or foreign 
markets. 

One sees the great breach between the two genera- 
tions in the biographies of fathers and children, in 
Henry James the elder and his two sons, or, more 
drastically, in Bronson Alcott and his far more 
famous daughter Louisa. Alcott, a son of a small 
Connecticut farmer, got an education peddling ‘‘no- 
tions” in the plantations of Virginia; and he became 
both a significant personality, and within the prov- 
ince of education, an interesting thinker: in an age 
that found Spencer too mystical and difficult, he was 
a walking embodiment of Plato and Plotinus. 
Louisa, one of his children, grew up in Bronson’s 
household, worshiped Emerson, and looked upon 
her father as a well-meaning but silly old man. As 
a result, the daughter of the philosopher reverted 


on a lower level to the Yankee peddler: she became 


[161] 


The Golden Day 
a hack writer, purveying lollypops and chocolate 


cordials to the middle-class market. Her realistic 
judgment and her bitter, merciless tongue were at 
the service of a childish fantasy: her fiction took the 
place in politer circles of the new ten-cent shocker. 

Of all Louisa Alcott’s books only one has survived 
for us. It is that which was made possible by the 
poor and abstemious life her father’s silly ways had 
thrust upon his children in Concord. Little Women 
was the picture of a happy childhood: that was all: 
yet it contained so much of what every child had 
gone through, and so much of what a starved child- 
hood would hope for, that it became universal. 
Louisa’s imagination offered her nothing that she 
could pit against this memory: with all its scrimp- 
ing and penury, the reality had been equal to the 
heart’s desire. All America after the war turned 
to Little Women: and why? Was it not because the 
only meaning of their life had been in childhood? 
Maturity, had nothing to offer them; it was only 
before they had started to make a living that they 
had lived. Boyhood meant home: maturity meant, 
not a larger home, but exile. Observe that the beam 
cast by Transcendentalism into the generation that 


followed was neither Nature nor the Duty of Civil 
[ 162 ] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


Disobedience nor the Orphic Sayings: no, Tran- 
cendentalism said nothing—except that childhood 
could be happy. ‘That was a recollection that 
smarted ! 

Those who were born after 1850 scarcely knew 
what they were missing; but those who had reached 
their nonage a little before the great conflict knew 
it only too well. ‘How surprised,” wrote one of 
them, “would some of those [Dial] writers be, if 
they should now in prosaic days read what they then 
wrote under the spell of that fine frenzy!” “We 


*¢ ‘realizing the ideal,’ 


have found,” wrote another, 
to be impracticable in proportion as the ideal is 
raised high. But ‘idealizing the real,’ as I shall 
maintain, is not only practicable but the main secret 
of the art of living. . . . There is a wise sentence 
in the otherwise trifling opera of the ‘Grand Duch- 
ess’ which says, ‘If we can’t get what we set our 
hearts on, we must set our hearts on what we can 
get.”’? Excellent wordly wisdom! Doubtless it 
made one a little more comfortable as one tossed 
uneasily on one’s bed at night, haunted by the ghost 
of what one might have been. 

The post-war generation idealized the real, in its 


novels, which depicted so much of actual existence 


[ 163 ] 


The Golden Day 
as might comfortably be exposed, and in its phi- 


losophy, which disclosed so much of the universe as 
could be assimilated to its feeble desires. As for 
those who knew better than this, what blighted fig- 
ures they were—outcasts, almost beyond the pale 
of humanity, the sad, grim Melville, the proud 
macabre Bierce. They lived in houses that were 
dingy wells of darkness; and in the innermost rooms 
of these houses, cut off from the light in front and 
the light in the rear, their souls dwelt too, unused 
to either happy memories or good prospects. ‘“Per- 


haps you know,” 


wrote Lanier to Bayard Taylor, 
“that with us of the younger generation in the South 
since the war, pretty much the whole of life has been 
merely not dying.” That held for the North as 
well. A good part of their life was merely not dying. 
Each of the principal literary figures of post-bellum 
America, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Henry 
James, William Dean Howells, William James, was 
the remains of aman. None was quite able to fill his 
own shape. They might doubt that a Golden Day 
had once dawned; but they had only to look around 
to discover the Gilt of their own. Well might the 
heroine of Henry Adams’s Democracy say: “You 
grow six inches tall and then you stop. Why will 
not somebody grow to be a tree and cast a shadow?” 


[ 1647 


The Pragmatic Acquescence 


II 


In America’s Coming of Age, Mr. Van Wyck 
Brooks first called attention to the broken rhythm of 
American life, with its highbrows and lowbrows, its 
Edwardses and Franklins, its transcendentalists and 
empiricists. ‘The gap between them widened after 
the Civil War; for the war left behind a barbar- 
ized population which had probably lost more civil 
habits in four years than the pioneer had in the 
course of forty. All that was left of Transcenden- 
talism in the Gilded Age was what Howells showed 
in the hero of A Hazard of New Fortunes—“an 
inner elegance.” The surviving idealist did not, 
perhaps, particularly believe in the practical work 
he found himself doing; but he did not believe in 
anything’ else sufficiently to cease doing it. In a 
quite simple and literal sense, he lacked the courage 
of his convictions: what was even worse, perhaps, 
was that he never acquired any new convictions that 
might have given him courage. The post-war gen- 
eration shows us nature-lovers like John Burroughs 
but no Thoreaus, schoolmasters like Sanborn and 
William Harris, but no Alcotts, novelists like How- 
ells, but no Melvilles. It is not hard to define the 

[165]. 


The Golden Day 
difference; to put it crudely, the guts of idealism 


were gone. 

The mission of creative thought is to gather into 
it all the living sources of its day, all that is vital 
in the practical life, all that is intelligible in science, 
all that is relevant in the social heritage and, recast- 
ing these things into new forms and symbols, to 
react upon the blind drift of convention and habit 
and routine. Life flourishes only in this alternating 
rhythm of dream and deed: when one appears with- 
out the other, we can look forward to a shrinkage, 
a lapse, a devitalization. Idealism is a bad name 
for this mission; it is just as correct to call it real- 
ism; since it is part of the natural history of the 
human mind. What is valid in idealism is the belief 
in this process of re-molding, re-forming, re-creat- 
ing, and so humanizing the rough chaos of existence. 
That belief had vanished: it no longer seemed a genu- 
ine possibility. As Moncure Conway had said: we 
must idealize the real. There was the work of a 
Howells, a Clemens, a James. It was an act of 
grand acquiescence. 'Transcendentalism, as Emer- 
son caustically said, had resulted in a headache; but 
the pragmatism that followed it was a paralysis. 
This generation had lost the power of choice; it 
bowed to the inevitable; it swam with the tide; and it 


[ 166 ] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


went as far as the tide would carry it. When Ed- 
ward Bellamy came to express the utmost of its 
ambitions, in the utopia called Looking Backward, 
his mind dwelt lovingly on telephonic broadcasting, 
upon perfect public restaurants, and upon purchase 
by sample, as in the mail-order houses—all excellent 
devices, perhaps, but not in themselves sufficient to 
stir the mind out of its sluggish acceptance of the 
blind drift of things. One remembers that a little 
earlier than Bellamy a certain Danish bishop began 
to institute the codperative commonwealth by revi~ 


ing the folk-ballads of his countrymen. 


iit 


William Dean Howells was, I think, the most 
pathetic figure in this post-war gallery; he so nar- 
rowly missed out. If only he had not been so full 
of the bourgeois proprieties, if only he had not been 
so conscious of the smug audience he was writing 
for; if only he had not looked so conscientiously for 
the smiling side of life, which he thought of as par- 
ticularly American. Could any one read Melville 
or Hawthorne and think that this was the character- 
istic touch of the American imagination? Impos- 
sible. The smile that Howells tried to preserve, un- 

[ 167 ] 


The Golden Day 


dimmed by tears, undistorted by passionate emotion, 
was only the inane mask of the booster. One is all 
the more moved to pity for Howells because, believ- 
ing in Tolstoi, he did not really love the America 
whose sensibilities he so carefully protected: he ap- 
preciated its snobbery, its pettiness, and its cruelty 
towards its financial inferiors. But social good will 
was in Howells’ scheme the principal, the standard 
virtue: he could not see that outright animosity 
might be preferable, if it led to beauties and excel- 
Jences that mere good will neglected to achieve. | 

Howells’ characters were all life-sized, medium, 
unheroic; he painted no heroes, because he did not 
see them in life. Alas! that was the best reason in 
the world for painting them. Life exists in the pos- 
sible as well as in the actual: the must and the maybe 
are equally valid. The conscientious littleness of 
Howells was painful: a man who saw as much as he’ 
did should not lean on a,gentlemanly walking stick. 
Mixing his love with prudence, Howells never went 
beyond the limits of conventional society: he could 
admire Tolstoi but he was incapable of his splendid 
and terrible folly. Howells had to a degree that 
should win for him forever the encomiums of our 
academic critics—the inner check. The inner ele- 


gance and the inner check were complementary parts 


[ 168] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


of his own personality ;-and as a result, even the best 
of his novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham, never quite 
reaches the marrow; for these checks and these 
elegances were the marks of the spiritual castration 
which almost all his contemporaries had undergone. 

Howells’ failure, at bottom, was a refusal of the 
imagination, not of the intellect. His traveler from 
Altruria saw all the absurdities and hypocrisies and 
degradations of American life; but he saw them, as 
it were, only through a single organ, the eye; and 
in order to show their inadequacy, Howells was 
driven to comparing them with the practices of a 
quite mythical commonwealth. The point was not, 
however, that the American of the Gilded Age had 
fallen short of some imagined human excellence: the 
point was that he had not succeeded in establishing 
a merely human life. It was this perception that 
later enabled Mr. Sinclair Lewis to turn Howells’ 
disgust for the contemporary scene into sharp satire, 
with an imaginative reality that is entirely lacking 
in A Traveller from Altruria and Through the Eye 
of The Needle. Mr. Howells kept his kindly feelings 
for Silas Lapham in one department; and his con- 
tempt for the abject and futile society the Laphams 
were creating in another; the result is that the fall 


of Silas Lapham was not a tragedy, since it was too 


[ 169 ] 


The Golden Day 


petty and personal in scope, and the picture of 
capitalistic America was not an inescapable satire, 
just for lack of some such fully-fleshed figure as 
Babbitt to replace Howells’ mannikins. Howells’ 
imagination and his conscience did not work to- 
gether: his figures all lack that imaginative distor- 
tion which takes place when a deep emotion or a 
strong feeling plays upon some actuality, like a 
blow-torch on metal, and enables the mind to twist 
the thing before it into a new shape. Babbitt 
is quite as human a figure as Silas Lapham; but he 
is actualized into something more than his apparent 
humanity by Mr. Lewis’s contempt for the banalities 
of his existence. The fact that Howells’ technical 
gifts were superior to Mr. Lewis’s only heightens his 
essential failure as an artist, and enables us to see 
how tightly he hugged the limitations of the con- 
temporary scene, and recorded them in his fiction. 
In contrast to Howells’ blind acceptance of mid- 
dle class America, Mark Twain’s rebellion, in the 
person of Huckleberry Finn, and his eventual pes- 
simism, may seem to carry with them a more robust 
flavor of reality. But as a matter of fact, Mark 
Twain was caught as deeply in the net of the indus- 
trialist and the pioneer as any of his contempora- 
ries ; and if he gloried in being captured, he suffered, 
[170 ] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


too, from its consequences. All that was durable in 
Mark Twain’s work traced back directly to his boy- 
hood and young manhood on the Mississippi before 
the Civil War: his life as a pilot had given him his 
one and only glimpse of the aristocratic man—the 
man who uniquely knows his business, as the old 
pilots knew the shoals of the Mississippi by the play 
of light or wind on the waters—the man who carries 
his point in the face of the crowd, as the Colonel 
defied the scurvy mob in Huckleberry Finn. In his 
mastery of pilotage, Mark Twain found himself; but 
he never sounded his own bottom so well in later life 
as he did in his career before the war. Mark Twain 
did not carry his sense of aristocracy to Europe 
with him; and when he refused to be “taken in” by 
the art galleries or cities of Europe, he was just as 
gullible in his refusal as were the new American mil- 
lionaires, in their eager acceptance of bogus Rem- 
brandts or Correggios. 

Mark Twain’s pessimism was as sentimental as 
Howells’ optimism. Like his contempt for Europe, 
his contempt for mankind at large rested upon the 
unconscious cheapening of values which had resulted 
in the miserable struggle for existence that took 


place in a Missouri pioneer village, or a Nevada min- 


[171] 


The Golden Day 


ing camp. Mark Twain at first saved himself from 
the impressions made by the blackguards and rowdies 
he had been among in the Far West by taking as his 
ideal their more civil counterparts, the industrialist 
and the inventor: these types became his creators: 
they alone were the people who furnished life with 
an amplitude of meaning, and because of their works, 
the Nineteenth Century was the “plainest and stur- 
diest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the 
centuries the world has seen.” But at the bottom 
of his soul, Mark Twain was revolted at the spec- 
tacle: he transferred his loathing of the current 
brutalities to a Celtic twilight, whilst his memory 
transformed the masculine smut of the roughneck 
into the youthful self-conscious dirtiness of 1601. 
He did not see that his Yankee mechanic was as 
absurd as Arthur himself, and that for every folly 
or vice or imbecility that may have existed in Eu- 
rope, a hundred others were springing up in post- 
bellum America. Mark Twain had an eye for the 
wretchedness of the peasant’s hovel: but apparently 
he had never walked half a mile eastward from his 
Fifth Avenue residence to contemplate the black 
squalor of the new immigrant workers. No: for 


Mark Twain industrialism was an end-in-itself; and 


eee a 


The Pragmatic Acquescence 


to fail to take it seriously and magniloquently was 
to rob life of its chief felicities. As M. Regis Mi- 
chaud has not unjustly said, in effect, comfort was 
for Mark Twain the chief art of his period. Com- 
fort put one in a mood to pardon anything that 
might accompany the system which produced it! 
Mark Twain’s naive worship of the paleotechnic 
age was summed up in the classic, the marvelous, the 
incredible letter he wrote to Walt Whitman in behalf 
of a little committee of literary men on Walt’s 
seventieth birthday. It was written with an embar- 
rassed avoidance of direct reference which makes 
one wonder a little whether Mark Twain had ever 
read Whitman; and it puts, better than any special 
explanation, the perfect fatuity of the Gilded Age. 


Here it is: 


To Walt Whitman: 

You have lived just the seventy years which are 
greatest in the world’s history and richest in benefit 
and advancement to its peoples. ‘These seventy years 
have done much more to widen the interval between 
man and the other animals than was accomplished 
by any of the five centuries which preceded them. 

What great births you have witnessed! The 
steam press, the steamship, the steelship, the rail- 


[173] 


The Golden Day 


road, the perfect cotton gin, the telegraph, the 
phonograph, photogravure, the electrotype, the 
gaslight, the electric light, the sewing machine and 
the amazing, infinitely varied and innumerable prod- 
ucts of coal tar, those latest and strangest marvels 
of a marvellous age. And you have seen even greater 
births than these; for you have seen the application 
of anesthesia to surgery-practice, whereby the an- 
cient dominion of pain, which began with the first 
created life, came to an end on this earth forever, 
you have seen the slave set free, you have seen 
monarchy banished from France and reduced in 
England to a machine which makes an imposing 
show of diligence and attention to business, but isn’t 
connected with the works. Yes, you have indeed 
seen much—but tarry for a while, for the greatest 
is yet to come. Wait thirty years, and then look 
out over the earth! You shall see marvels upon 
marvels added to those whose nativity you have wit- 
nessed ; and conspicuous above them you shall see 
their formidable Result—man at almost his full 
stature at last!—and still growing, visibly growing 
while you look. . . . Wait till you see that great 
figure appear, and catch the far glint of the sun 
upon his banner; then you may depart satisfied, as 


knowing you have seen him for whom the earth was 


[174] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


made, and that he will proclaim that human wheat 
is more than human tares, and proceed to organize 
human values on that basis. 

Marx Twain. 


The thirty years duly passed! the marvels came 
—aeroplanes and dirigibles that assailed helpless 
_ cities; flame throwers and poison gases that sug- 
gested newer and more ingenious forms of torture 
than rack, wheel, or faggot; explosives and deadlier 
gases that threatened to exterminate not merely 
active combatants but every vestige of organic life 
in the region subjected to them. Towards the end 
of those thirty beautiful years, men applied, in a 
black rage of warfare, more satanic ingenuities than 
Mark Twain himself had dreamed of when he rigged 
up the defense which the Connecticut Yankee made 
against the feudal hordes in the last chapter, and 
slayed ten thousand men by a bolt of electric cur- 
rent. Man almost at his full stature at last! That 
the saturnine commentary on this letter should have 
come so punctually within the allotted generation 
is no doubt only an accident; but that Mark Twain 
should have dwelt on all these physical improve- 
ments, and never once have thought to mention that 
the Nineteenth Century was the century of Goethe, 

[175 ] 


The Golden Day 


Emerson, Tolstoi, and above all, of Whitman him- 
self—that, I am afraid, was no accident, but the 
result of his fundamental barbarism. Poor Dante! 
Poor Shakespeare: thrice happy Whitman! Alas! 
of all the jokes Mark Twain ever labored to utter, 
this that fell so innocently from his pen was perhaps 
the wryest, and I am not sure but that it may cling 
longest to his memory. 


IV 


In a different fashion from Howells, Mark Twain 
was afraid of his imagination. Almost every time 
he felt an impulse towards poetry or beauty, he 
caught himself up short and mocked at it—and this 
mockery, this sudden passage from the sublime to 
the grotesque, became one of the stock ingredients 
of his humor. What did he sacrifice these fine im- 
pulses to? Nothing better than the accepted inter- 
ests and habits of the utilitarian: he abruptly for- 
gets the beauties of the Mississippi to tell the reader 
how many new factories have been started in 
Memphis, or he turns aside from the spectacle of 
the Hawaiian landscape to record the price of a 
canoe ride, or the difficulties of hiring a horse. 


Mark Twain’s works were as full of scrappy in- 


C176] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


formation as an almanac: almost any externality 
interested him more than his own feelings, his own 
reactions, or the products of his imagination. In 
the experience of the mining community, the only 
uses of the imagination had been to tell tall lies: 
Mark Twain knew that use and employed it well in 
his many comic and admirable anecdotes: but he 
was not aware that the imagination might tell even 
taller truths, and at the faintest exhibition of this 
office, he would draw up quickly with a sudden 
grimace of embarrassment. 

The futility of a society that denied, starved, 
frustrated its imaginative life, and had sacrificed 
every legitimate human desire for the spread of 
mechanical contrivances and the successes of finance, 
as Mark Twain himself was ready to sacrifice on 
occasion his most intimate convictions and do “not 
a bad thing, but not the best thing,” in order to 
make himself more acceptable to his fellow-country- 
men—this futility translated itself in Mark Twain’s 
mind into the futility of mankind itself. In an es- 
tablished society, the solitary individual is always 
buoyed up in his weak moments by the traditions of 
his college, his profession, his family, his city: he 
feels the continuity of these institutions, knows that 
they have had good and happy moments; and looks 

fir7] 


The Golden Day 


forward to the time when they may come again. 
Pioneer society, having no past, and no continuity, 
could have no future, either. Men were corrupt: 
every man had his price: they were foolish: every 
one practiced his folly. Mark Twain had no notion 
that the pioneer settlement or the slick industrial 
town was a special and temporary phenomenon, 
something that had followed the breakdown of a 
great culture; and no more representative of a 
truly human society than the weeds that break into 
a garden which has fallen away from cultivation. 
The point is that human culture is a continuous 
process of choosing, selecting, nurturing, a process 
also of cutting down and exterminating those merely 
hardy and fecund weeds which have no value except 
their own rank life. “Choosing is creating, hear 
that, ye creating ones!” ‘Thus spake Zarathustra. 

Without persistently keeping to this process, 
human society tends to run wild, and in its feral 
state it serves no purpose whatever, and is empty, 
meaningless, unattractive. Cultivation is man’s 
natural and proper condition; for life in the raw 
is empty. Like all his generation, Mark Twain was 
incapable of active choice. He accepted the values 
that surrounded him, and since they were not central 
human values—and he was too honest not to realize 


[178 | 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 
this—he stored up, secretly, the bile of despair. 


Man was an automaton: a mere creature of the 
forces that worked upon him. That he had also 
been a creator, and might be so once again—Mark 
Twain could not believe this. When he exercized 
his aristocratic capacities for standing alone, it 
was on minor and safe matters, like Christian Sci- 
ence and Foreign Missions. An automaton should 
not risk his mechanism on more precious human 
issues. 

The depth of Mark Twain’s despair was partly 
hidden by his'humor; but in his contemporary, Am- 
brose Bierce, the mechanism of concealment was 
lacking, and all that one faced was the pitted earth, 
iridescent with the decay of dead bodies, like sullied 
black opals. Bierce’s stories of the Civil War and 
his other tales of horror, were all filled with an honest 
and irredeemable blackness. He, too, had seen the 
very worst of mankind, on the battlefield and in the 
pioneer town; and all the horror of these grisly 
images remained with him, and colored his imagi- 
native life. The potion Bierce brewed was too bitter 
for his contemporaries to swallow; and his work re- 
mained in relative obscurity, which perhaps only 
increased his sense of aloof contempt: Bierce’s 
readers preferred a sentimental realist like Bret 


[179] 


The Golden Day 


Harte, whose local color was of the boughten kind. 
Bierce did not conceal his poisons: one drank them 
neat: and though they have an independent value 
as literature, in certain moods, one thinks of them 
here as an emblem of the dismal vacancy left in the 
mind by the devastation of the Civil War and the 
period of sordid peace that followed it. Bierce’s 
qualities, unlike Poe’s, were only partly tempera- 
mental: they arose out of an external experience 
which had no internal state to correspond with it 
outside the madhouse. 

Warfare is in more than one sense a killing mat- 
ter; and as the pioneer, on the testimony of John 
Hay, was usually old and gray before his time, so 
this generation of Clemens and Bierce, which had 
known both warfare and pioneering, and precious 
little of anything else, found themselves living in the 
shades of the charnel house. Thinking of the works 
and thoughts of these men, one wonders more and 
more what Howells meant when he said that the 
typical aspects of American life were the smiling 
ones. Was the pioneer happy? Was the returned 
soldier happy? Was the defeated idealist happy? 
And what of the industrialists who turned manufac- 


turing into a form of warfare, surrounded their steel 


[1807] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


works or pit-heads with barbed wire, and_ hired 
armed thugs to defend their plants against strikers 
—were they or their workmen in a smiling mood? 
The open corruption of Grant’s administration, 
equaled only by that of the lamented administration 
which followed the recent Great War, the graft of 
Tweed rings and similar organizations in every large 
city, the ugliness and filth of the growing industrial 
towns—all these things formed a villainous pattern 
for the mind to follow. 

Men like Charles Eliot Norton, the friend of Rus- 
kin, might be unhappy when they contemplated the 
scene; but at least, they did not believe that the 
Nineteenth was the greatest of centuries; and they 
did not fancy that the followers of Watt and Smiles 
were the highest types of humanity the earth had 
known. But what of people who did believe in the 
triumphs of the land-pioneer and the industry- 
pioneer: what of those who thought these were the 
Coming Men, and their works the final glory of 
Progress? They might quote statistics till the 
cows came home: they had only to look around them 
to discover that, humanly speaking, they were in the 
midst of a dirty mess. Machines got on: real estate 
went up: inventions became more ingenious: money 
multiplied: physical comforts increased: all these 

[ 181 ] 


The Golden Day 


achievements could not be denied. But men and 
women—they somewhow did not reflect these great 
triumphs by an equivalent gain of beauty and wis- 
dom. On the contrary, the nervous, irritable, 
scarred faces of Thomas Eakins’ portraits cannot 
be placed alongside the strong, reposed heads, sound 
even if a little fatuous, that stretched between Copley 
and Morse; and beside the light that shone trans- 
parently in Emerson’s eye, or the great sweet sanity 
of Whitman’s body, or the wiry grace of Thoreau, 
the noblest figures of the Gilded Age sagged and 
twitched a little. These children of industrialism 
were not the kind to keep cool and composed before 
a million universes: they lost their balance and their 
integrity before much less important things than a 
universe. 

The Gilded Age tarnished quickly: culture could 
not flourish in that environment. Those who could 
not accept their external milieu fled abroad, like 
Henry James. As for those who remained, perhaps 
the most significant of all was William James. He 
gave this attitude of compromise and acquiescence a 
name: he called it pragmatism: and the name stands 
not merely for his own philosophy, but for some- 
thing in which that philosophy was deeply if 
unconsciously entangled, the spirit of a whole age. 


[1827] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


a 


William James, born in 1842, became a philos- 
opher by a long, circuitous route, which began with 
chemistry, physiology, and medicine, and first flour- 
ished in its own right only as the century came to 
an end. As a youth, he debated over his capacities 
as an artist, and threw them aside. As a mature 
mind, he was ridden by an overwhelming interest in 
philosophy; but for twenty years or more he threw 
that aside, too. The deflection of his career from 
his innermost wishes was, one is inclined to think, the 
outcome of a neurotic conflict, which plagued him 
as a young man of twenty-eight. Equipped with a 
cosmopolitan education, and a wide variety of con- 
tacts in Europe, James returned to his own soil with 
the wan longing of an exile. Every time he greeted 
Europe, apparently, its charms increased his home- 
sickness. He had for America some of the agitated 
enthusiasm and unguarded receptivity of a convert. 
He resisted Europe: he accepted America, and 
though he disliked at times the dusty, meeting-house 
air of Cambridge, he returned to it, and breathed it, 
as if it had descended from the mountain tops. 

One searches James’s pages in vain for a Welt- 


anschauung: but one gets an excellent view of 


[183 7] 


The Golden Day 


America. He had the notion that pragmatism 
would effect an overturn in philosophy: but the fact 
was that it killed only what was already dead, the 
dry, unrelated rationalism of the theologists, or the 
vacant absolutism of idealists who chose to take 
the philosophy of Hegel without the concrete his- 
tory which gave it a rational content. James’s lack 
of a world view was due as much as anything, per- 
haps, to his positive dread of the difficulties of at- 
taining one. In the crisis of his illness in 1870, 
under the influence of his newly attained belief in 
free-will, he wrote: “‘Not in maxims, not in Anschau- 
ungen, but in accumulated acts of thought lies sal- 
vation.” Hence the fragmentary quality of James’s 
philosophy. His supreme act of thought was his 
Psychology, a book over which he labored for a 
decade; but though the book is full of discreet wis- 
dom and penetrating observation, carried to the 
limits of the scientific investigation of his day, James 
himself was dissatisfied with this act—it had im- 
peded his progress towards Philosophy! 

Beside the richness of Emerson’s thought, which 
played over the whole field of existence, James was 
singularly jejune: he made up for his lack of com- 
prehensive ideas by the brilliance and the whimsical 
reasonableness of his personality. He divested phi- 

[ 184] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


losophy of its high hat and its painful white collar, 
and by the mere force of his presence made it human 
again. His personality had the curious effect of 
giving vitality to even moribund ideas; and the 
superficial reader might easily mix up the full- 
blooded James with the notions that lived again 
through this temporary transfusion. He was above 
all things the psychologist, commenting upon the 
place of philosophy and religion in the individual | 
life, rather than the thinker, creating the philosophy 
which should take the place. His pragmatism was 
—was it not?—an attempt to cut through a per- 
sonal dilemma and still preserve logical consistency: 
he wished to retain some surviving representative of 
the God of his fathers, without throwing over the 
scientific method in the fields where it had proved 
valuable. He used philosophy to seek peace, rather 
than understanding, forgetful of the fact that if 
peace is all one needs, ale can do more “than Milton 
can, to justify God’s ways to man.” I am not sure 
but that this search for anesthetics may prove in 
the long run to be the clue to the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, in all its depauperate phases. The use of ether 
itself first came as a parlor sport in dull little 
American communities that had no good wine to 


bring a milder oblivion from their boredom; and 


[185 7] 


The Golden Day 


perhaps one may look upon anesthetics in all their 
physical and spiritual forms—ether, Christian Sci- 
ence, speed—as the culmination of the Protestant 
attack upon the senses. I throw this out by the 
way. The fact is that pragmatism was a blessed 
anesthetic. 

If one could reconstruct New England in Emer- 
son, one could, I think, recover great tracts of 
pioneer and industrial America from the pragma- 
tists, the pioneer especially in James, the industrial- 
ist in his great pupil, Dewey. James’s insistence 
upon the importance of novelty and freshness echoes 
on a philosophic plane the words of Mark Twain. 
“What is it that confers the noblest delight? ... 
Discovery! 'To know that you are walking where no 
others have walked, that you are beholding what 
human eye has not seen before; that you are breath- 
ing virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea—to 
discover a great thought. . . . To find a new planet, 
to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the 
lightning carry your message. ‘To be the first— 
that is the idea.” James’s opposition to a block 
universe, his notion that salvation had to be worked 
out, his feeling that there was no savor, no excite- 
ment, no interest “in following the good path if 


we do not feel that evil is also possible and natural, 


[186] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


nay, threatening and imminent’—what was all this, 
too, but the animus of the pioneer, translated into 
dialectic? 

I do not say this to belittle James’s interest in 
these notions: a philosophy must, plainly, grow out 
of an experience of life, and the feeling of boundless 
possibility that springs from James’s pages was one 
of the healthy influences of the frontier. The point 
is, however, that a valuable philosophy must take 
into account a greater range of experiences than 
the dominating ones of a single generation; it is 
good to include these, but if it includes only these, 
it is still in a state of cultural adolescence. It is 
the remote and the missing that the philosopher 
must be ready to supply: the Spartan element in 
Plato’s Republic was not familiar or genial to the 
Athenian temperament; but in the dry-rot of Athe- 
nian democracy it was the one element that might 
have restored it, and Plato went outside his familiar 
ground to take account of it and supply it. In Eu- 
rope, James’s influence has proved, I think, invigorat- 
ing; for European philosophy had assimilated no 
such experiences as the frontier offered, and the 
pluralism and free-mindedness of James provided a 
release from a too cut-and-dried universe of dis- 


course, 


[187] 


The Golden Day 


In America, however, James was only warming 
over again in philosophy the hash of everyday ex- 
perience in the Gilded Age: he did not make a fresh 
combination, or a new application of these experi- 
ences; he was the reporter, rather than the creator. 
James’s most important contribution to metaphysics 
was possibly his technical analysis of radical empir- 
icism, which put relations and abstract qualities on 
the same plane as physical objects or the so-called 
external world: both were given in experience. But 
the totality of James’s philosophy has to-day 
chiefly an illustrative value: woe to the seeker who 
tries to live by it, or find in it the key to a reason- 
able existence. The new ideas that James achieved 
were not so influential as those he accepted and 
rested upon; and the latter, pretty plainly, were the 
protestantism, the individualism, the scientific dis- 
trust of “values,’”? which had come down in unbroken 
succession from Calvin and Luther, from Locke and 
Hobbes and Hume and Bentham and Mill. 

James referred to pragmatism as “an alteration 
in the ‘seat of authority’ that reminds one of the 
protestant reformation. And as, to papal minds, 
protestantism has often seemed a mere mess of 
anarchy and confusion, such, no doubt, will prag- 


matism seem to ultra-rationalist minds in philosophy. 


[188] 


The Pragmatic Acquescence 


. . . But life wags on all the same, and compasses 
its ends, in protestant countries. I venture to think 
that philosophic protestantism will compass a not 
dissimilar prosperity.” How curious was James’s 
illusion that ine was compassing its ends! That was 
just the point: that was what any one with a sense 
of history was forced to doubt when he contem- 
plated the “prosperity” of Manchester, Essen, Glas- 
gow, Lille, or Pittsburgh: life, distinctly, was not 
compassing its ends, and all the boasting and self- 
gratulation in the world could not hide the fact that 
something was wrong, not just in particulars, but 
with the whole scheme of existence. The particulars 
were all right in their place: men must delve and — 
spin and weave and smelt and fetch and carry and 
build; but once these things get out of place, and, 
instead of ministering to life, limit all its functions, 
the ends for which life exists are not being com- 
passed. The very words James used to recommend 
pragmatism should make us suspicious of its pre- 
tensions. 

“For my part,” cried William James, “I do not 
know what sweat and blood, what the tragedy of 
this life means except just this: if life is not a strug- 
gle in which by success, there is something gained 


[189] 


The Golden Day 


on behalf of the universe, then it is no more than 
idle amusement.” What is this universe which gains 
something by man’s conflict? Is it not, perhaps, 
like the concept of “the country” which gains vir- 
tue by a boy scout’s doing one good turn per day? 
The Hindu guru, the Platonic philosopher, aloof 
from this struggle, is not virtuous in James’s sense; 
neither is the pure scientist, the Clerk-Maxwell, the 
Faraday, the Gibb, the Einstein—the activity of 
all these creatures, what is it but “idle amusement?” 
James’s half-lost and half-redeemed universe satis- 
fied the combative instincts: but life would still be 
amusing and significant were every vexatious devil 
banished, were every thorn plucked, were every mos- 
quito exterminated! To find significance only in 
the fight, in the “faction,” was the signal of boredom: 
significant action is either the exercise of a natural 
function, or activity towards an end. It was the 
temper of James’s mind, and it is the temper of 
protestantism generally, to take more pleasure in 
the obstacles than in the achievement. It has the 
courage to face danger and disaster: this is its great 
quality: but it has not the courage to face prosper- 
ity. In short, protestantism triumphs in a crisis; 


but it is tempted to prolong the crisis in order to 
[190 ] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


perpetuate the triumph. A humane life does not 
demand this digging and dogging at the universe; 
it prospers as well in Eden as it does in the rorty 
wilderness outside. Growth, development, and re- 
production are not categories of the battlefield. 
With all the preoccupations fostered by the Gilded 
Age, which were handed down to the succeeding gen- 
eration, it was inevitable, I think, that James’s ideas 
should have been caricatured. His doctrine of the 
verification of judgment, as something involved in 
the continuous process of thinking, instead of a pre- 
existent correspondence between truth and reality, 
was distorted in controversy into a belief in the 
gospel of getting on. ‘The carefully limited area 
he left to religious belief in The Will-to-Believe was 
transformed by ever-so-witty colleagues into the 
Will-to-make-believe. His conscious philosophy of 
pragmatism, which sought to ease one of the mighty, 
recurrent dilemmas of his personal life, was trans- 
lated into a belief in the supremacy of cash-values 
and practical results; and the man who was perhaps 
one of the most cosmopolitan and cultivated minds 
of his generation was treated at times as if he were 
a provincial writer of newspaper platitudes, full of 


the gospel of smile. | 
[191 ] 


The Golden Day 


On the surface, these reactions betrayed little 
more than the ingrained bias of James’s academic 
colleagues; and yet, as I say, the caricature was 
almost inevitable, and in his persistent use of finan- 
cial metaphors he was himself not a little responsible 
for it. James’s thought was permeated with the 
smell of the Gilded Age: one feels in it the com- 
promises, the evasions, the desire for a comfortable 
resting place. , Getting on was certainly never in 
James’s mind, and cash values did not engross even 
his passing attention; but, given his milieu, they 
were what his words reénforced in the habits of the 
people who gave themselves over to his philosophy. 
Personally, he was “against all big organizations 
as such, national ones first and foremost; and 
against all big successes and big results; but there 
was nothing in his philosophy that necessitated these 
beliefs in his followers. 

An English friend of mine used to say that the 
old-fashioned London banker was often, like Lord 
Avebury, a financier and a cultivated man: the sec- 
ond generation usually remained good financiers, 
but had no interest in art or science; the third gen- 
eration were complete duffers, and good for neither 


activity. Something like this happened with the 
[192] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


pragmatists. There is an enormous distance between 
William James and the modern professors who be- 
come employees in advertising agencies, or bond 
salesmen, or publicity experts, without any sense of 
professional degradation; but the line that connects 
them is a fairly clear one. Of James one may say 
with sorrow that he built much worse than he knew. 
There was still in his personality a touch of an 
older and honester America—the America of Emer- 
son and of Henry James, Senior, the America that 
had overthrown the old aristocracies so that every 
man might claim his place as an aristocrat. But 
the generation for whom James wrote lived in the 
dregs of the Gilded Age; and it was not these re- 
moter flavors of personality that they enjoyed. As 
one comes to James to-day, one is touched by the ; 
spectacle of a fine personality, clipped and halted in 
its flight. As for his philosophy, one cannot doubt 
that it worked. What one doubts is whether the 
results of this work were valuable. 


VI 


It was those who stood outside the circle of the 
Gilded Age that have, within the last ten or fifteen 
[193 J 


The Golden Day 


years, come to seem more important than the 
dominating figures: Albert Pinkham Ryder in paint- 
ing, Emily Dickinson in poetry, and Charles Pierce 
in philosophy. The overtones of the pioneering 
experience or the industrial scramble were absent 
for the most part in Pierce’s writings; it was for 
that reason, quite as much as for their technical 
precision, that they remained unpopular. Pierce 
was not disrupted by the compromises and shifts of 
the Gilded Age: he lived his own life, and made 
none. As a philosopher, he thought deeply about 
logic, science, history, and the values that ennoble 
life; and his philosophy was what his own age deeply 
needed. It has remained for Professor Morris 
Cohen, in our own time, to resurrect his papers and 
to discover how fresh and appropriate they are, 
almost two generations after the first of them was 
published. Pierce had no part in the pragmatic 
acquiescence. His voice was a lonely protest. He 
was lost between two circles: the pragmatists, who 
were dominated, in Mr. Santayana’s excellent phrase, 
by the foreground; and another group, equally 
pragmatic, equally a product of the Gilded Age, 
_ which was searching for a background. It is these 
_ latter who sought, in their own way, to fill up the 
[194] 


The Pragmatic Acquiescence 


vacancy that pragmatism left. William James be- 
longed to one group; Henry James to the other; 
and the America after 1900 was largely the spir- 
itual heir of one or another of these remarkable 
brothers, 


[195 ] 





CHAPTER FIVE 


THE PILLAGE OF THE PAST 





i 


Tue raffish vitality of the Gilded Age was not 
quite exhausted by manufacturing and gambling and 
astute corporate financiering. The pragmatists had 
indeed given depth to the adventure of industrial- 
ism; they had sanctioned the values that were up- 
permost; but they offered no clue as to what made 
a proper human life outside the mill of practical 
activity. The great captains of industry were 
caught within their own wheels, and were as helpless 
to escape as the meanest hunky who worked for 
them. One remembers Andrew Carnegie’s resolution 
to resign from business in his early thirties, broaden 
his education, and settle down at Oxford or some 
other old center of culture: but the mighty wills that 
built the great fortunes were palsied as soon as they 
sought to withdraw from the game. In America, 
industry was not merely bread and butter; it was 
love, adventure, worship, art, and every sort of 
ideality; and to withdraw from industry was to 
become incapacitated for any further life. 


Sooner or later, however, the reckoning was 


[199] 


The Golden Day 
bound to come. The position had been gained; the 


money had been accumulated; the sons and daugh- 
ters had come into leisure—well, what was to be done 
with it? In the Gilded Age this question concerned 
only a handful of people; but now that a vast ac- 
cession of energies threatens the ancient economic 
practices, based on manual labor and personal thrift, 
with gradual obsolescence, the question has become 
a universal one, since it begins to bear on a growing 
army of workers, and not merely upon the minority 
who have escaped work altogether. The answer 
made by the Gilded Age is still the most popular 
answer in America; and for that reason, it is per- 
haps not unworthy of scrutiny. The pragmatists 
had tried to make a culture out of a partial and one- 
sided experience; those who came into leisure and 
money during the Gilded Age sought to achieve a 
culture without any basis in experience. 

Sometime during this period the epithet preda- 
tory millionaire was coined. It was strictly accu- 
rate as applied to the financial activities of a Daniel 
Drew, a Rockefeller, a Carnegie, a Morgan; but it 
was also appropriate in a wider sense. When the 
time came to spend these accumulations, this gen- 


eration turned out to have a predatory notion of 


[ 200] 


The Pillage of the Past 


culture. Dissatisfied with the dingy environment of 
Chicago, Pittsburgh, or New York, between 1870 
and 1900, those who had the money and the special 
animus began to look abroad for a cultural back- 
ground. ‘The merely practical men were still con- 
tent to get their joy out of industrial enterprise and 
financial manipulation in themselves; or they threw 
themselves heartily into Civil Service Reform, clean- 
ing up politics, the silver standard or prohibition or 
trust regulation, or, with a daring sense of adven- 
ture, the initiative, the referendum and the recall. 
The remnant who had lost active interest in these 
things, continued to pursue them in sublimated 
forms. Conscious of the emptiness of their lives, 
outside the busy routine of trade, they sought to 
fill up the tedium by spending money instead of earn- 
ing it. What they had over from sport and fashion 
went into art, and to the culture associated with its 
ancient practices. 

One might think that this attempt to acquire the 
memorials of culture, on the part of a Mrs. Jack 
Gardner or a J. Pierpont Morgan the elder, was just 
the sporadic idiosyncrasy of the rich; but the same 
movement was reflected in and incised into various 


works of the mind: in the novels of Henry James, 


[ 201 ] 


The Golden Day 


in the historical memoirs of Henry Adams, and in 
the great philosophic compendium by Mr. George 
Santayana which rounded off and consummated all 
the more genuine aspects of this effort. Where the 
pioneer had gone west, the sons of the pioneer went 
eastward; where the pioneer, looking upon Europe, 
had been an honest boor, the new disciples of culture 
had become a little servile and sheepish. At bottom, 
this return to Europe and this absorption in the 
externalities of art, architecture, and social custom 
were part and parcel of the same movement: for they 
arose out of an uneasy sense that the old culture 
had gone, and a new one no longer filled the daily 
life. The new pioneers in Europe were not the less 
on the move because they were touring or sightsee- 
ing; nor were they the less interested in pecuniary 
goods; nor did their efforts, on the whole, produce 
anything more than a sense of sublime sterility. But 
there was this saving grace: the mind was a little 
more active, and with all their several incapacities, 
Henry James and Henry Adams and George San- 
tayana were less subdued to banality than their 
counterparts among the pragmatists: a good mu- 
seum has after all something that a poor society 


does not possess. 


[ 202 7] 


The Pillage of the Past 


II 


America may be defined by its possessions, or by 
the things that it lacks. On the second count our 
country is plainly a place without a long past, with- 
out a court and an aristocracy, without a stable | 
tradition and definite connections, without the 
graces and souvenirs of an old and civil community. 
Those who feel that these deficiencies are intolerable 
now make what they can of the date of their ances- 
tral arrival in the country, attempt to give the fac- 
titious aristocracy of riches the air of having long 
escaped from the factory or the counting house, and 
make up for the paucity of art in America by an 
exaggerated respect for the products of American 
craftsmanship. Sixty years ago, however, butter- 
fly tables were still in the attic, and a good many of 
the “fold families’? had scarcely a grandfather to 
boast on the new soil. 

The crudity and vacancy of the new American 
society had become apparent by the middle of the 
Nineteenth Century. Henry James has given his 
own testimony. “I saw my parents homesick, as I 
conceived, for the ancient order and distressed and 
inconvenienced by many of the more immediate fea- 


tures of the modern, as the modern pressed upon us, 


[ 208 ] 


The Golden Day 


and since their theory of our better living was from 
an early time that we should renew the quest of the 
ancient on the very first possibility, I simply grew 
greater in the faith that somehow to manage that 
would constitute success in life.” Henry James, 
Senior, was among the forerunners of the movement: 
the tide began to set definitely in this direction after 
1870. Turning away from Nature, externalized and 
unassimilated, the new generation turned towards 
an equally foreign and externalized culture. The 
ugliness and sordidness of the contemporary urban 
scene could not be exaggerated; but they averted 
themselves from the scene itself, instead of confront- 
ing the forces that were producing it. 

For the dominant generation of the seventies, the 
new personalities that had begun to humanize Amer- 
ica did not exist: art and culture meant the past: 
it meant Europe: it meant over the seas and far 
away. Whitman was as remote as Dante: and did 
not Henry Adams himself, shrewdest if most pa- 
thetic of the children of light, not tell of his hopeless 
effort to come to terms with “Concord,” and the 
reason, too? Henry Adams “perpetually fell back 
into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, 
it was himself and not the appearances; it was the 
poet and not the banker.” Well might he call this 

[ 204 7] 


The Pillage of the Past 


heresy ; for when the poet and philosopher no longer 
feel at the bottom of their hearts that their world 
is an essential part of that which surrounds them, 
that it is that portion of the practical life which 
has passed from necessity and routine into the do- 
main of significance—when this conviction fails 
them, they have indeed given up the ghost. A genu- 
ine culture was beginning again to struggle upward 
in the seventies: a Pierce, a Shaler, a Marsh, a Gibbs, 
a Ryder, a Roebling, a Thomas Eakins, a Richard- 
son, a Sullivan, an Adams, a La Farge were men 
that any age might proudly exhibit and make use 
of. But the procession of American civilization 
divided and walked around these men. The prag- 
matists became more narrow, and lived more com- 
pletely in their Seventeenth Century framework; 
whilst those who espoused culture turned away from 
the living plant, pushing through the hard, argilla- 
ceous soil of the Gilded Age, in order to acquire and 
hold the pressed flowers, the dead and dismembered 
stalks, or the sweetish preserved fruits of Europe’s 
ancient cultures—authentic because they grew in 
Europe, valuable, because they could not be pro- 
duced in our own day, except by patent tricksters. 

One does not know which was sadder, this pillage 
of the past, or the condition which gave rise to it. 


[2057] 


The Golden Day 
It began with an effort to be at home in Europe; 


the effort came into literature and took on form in 
the novels of Henry James. The American who 
loses himself in the Louvre, after having frittered 
away a gainful young manhood in commerce, and 
presently finds himself caught by a complicated and 
dense tissue of social custom—this figure might 
serve as a watermark for the general effort. James 
himself settled down in Europe and spent his whole 
life endeavoring to plumb this density. He sought 
to transfix in society what Whistler had so often 
tried to do in Nature—give a content to atmosphere 
and impalpability. He accepted Europe and its 
finish as the pioneer accepted Nature and its raw- 
ness: he did not want to do anything to it, he had no 
desire to assimilate it and make it over. Emerson, 
echoing the thoughts of every honest contemporary, 
had said that one could not become part of English 
society without wasting one’s efforts in an attempt 
to transform it; he felt that identification would 
mean a loss of what was most precious in his own 
social heritage, and that struggle, for an outsider, 
would be quite futile. 

Henry James, on the contrary, gave to Europe 
his entire loyalty; so far from wanting to change it, 
he wished rather to fix it: he could not be guilty of 

£206 7] 


The Pillage of the Past 


republican satire, like Meredith; he could not lift 
the scene to the level of tragedy, like Hardy; for 
James to think obliquely of Sir Willoughby Pat- 
terne’s legs would have been to destroy the whole 
illusion of culture in which, deliberately, he en- 
meshed himself. Merely for an institution to be 
“there” was to make it, for James, valuable. What 
was interesting were the shades, the nice distinctions, 
all the evidences of long-established usage. It was 
not that James was altogether incapable of seeing the 
shallowness and tawdriness of some of his fine people; 
but for him these qualities were as nothing beside the 
fineness, the fragility of sensation, which made them 
so exquisitely what they were. Life might be many 
things in Europe; but for the classes among whom 
his imagination dwelt it was not raw. It had pre- 
cisely what the American scene lacked: the implica- 
tion of having been done a thousand times, until the 
finest deviation from pattern became as violent as 
a complete departure. Henry James treated in his 
novels, in a remote gentlemanly way, the perplexities 
and delights that the cartoonists in Life were touch- 
ing in the eighties: he answered the question: “How . 
must one behave in Europe?” 

It was useless to tell James that this acceptance 
of Europe as complete, final, established, was only 

[ 207 || 


The Golden Day 


an effort to wake the dead. What was alive in the 
Europe of James’s day, the thought of a Tolstoi or 
a Nietzsche or a William Morris, had nothing to do 
with the Europe of place and precedent. That 
Europe was failing because its humanism had become 
dry and sterile, because what it called culture did 
not tend to become the shared possession of the whole 
community, because it was not steadily assimilating 
the results of commerce, science, and industry in 
new forms of culture, but was permitting these 
things to exist in the raw, and to slop over into 
provinces once adequately occupied by art and 
religion. James was no more conscious of the 
Europe of Nietzsche than he was of the America of 
Emerson: neither of these thinkers made any dif- 
ference to him. As for the past, it was not a source 
of new life, but a final measure of what existed in 
the present. When one takes the past in this fash- 
ion, nothing new is good, because what is good is 
only what has been done before. 

In short, Henry James treated Europe as a 
museum. By communing with its show-cases and 
its specimens, he could forget that the modern of 
Europe was precisely as inconvenient and distressing 
as the modern of his America. Europe’s past was 


of course richer than America’s—no thanks, how- 


[ 208 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 


ever, to the forces that had been at work since the 
Seventeenth Century. Its valuable modern contri- 
butions were not limited to the old soil: the products 
of the factory and the laboratory were common to 
Western Civilization, and it was only in a mood of 
excessive self-abasement that the American need for- 
get that from Franklin to Gibb, from Bartram to 
Cope, from Fulton to Edison, the American com- 
munity had continued to produce figures which could 
stand easily on the same pedestal as the modern 
European. The medieval and renaissance past had 
left their rich memorials in Kurope, and only vestiges 
in America; but in those aspects of life where West- 
ern culture had become poor and mean, Europe and 
America were both in the same state. What people 
had quickly come to call the Americanization of 
Europe—what was that but a falling away of the 
old garments of culture, and the exposure of the 
scraggly, embryonic form of a new culture, a skele- 
ton without flesh, and without any central organ to 
control and direct its random motions? 

If Europe had become more conscious of its physi- 
cal plight under the new regime in industry, and had 
raised an Owen, a Carlyle, a Marx, to denounce © 
the conventions under which the rich became richer 


and the poor poorer, in the new system as well as 


[ 209] 


The Golden Day 


under the old, the American was equally conscious 
of the fact that the old culture had become impov- 
erished, too, and that, though it had served well in 
its own day, it no longer sufficed. “The New Ameri- 
cans .. .” said Henry Adams, “must, whether they 
were fit or unfit, create a world of their own, a 
science, a society, a philosophy, a universe, where 
they had not yet created a road or even learned to 
dig their own iron.” With the living effort to create 
such a new world, and so carry on the work of the 
Golden Day, the politer heirs of the Gilded Age had 
nothing to do. They did not merely bury them- 
selves, with the aid of Baedeker, in the European 
past: they went a step further, they began to collect 
and embalm its scattered fragments, with a truly 
Egyptian reverence for the dead. 

The Eighteenth Century had in its own phase of 
sterility converted the curio cabinet of the country 
house and the loot heap of the ruling dynasty into 
a public museum. These new and ardent disciples 
of culture went a step farther: they sought, not 
without success, to turn the contents of the museum 
back again into the private house. The leader of 
this movement, if one can single out one figure for 
this distinction among a whole host of successful 
and wistful and pushing people, was perhaps Mrs. 

[ 210 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 
Jack Gardner, the builder of Fenway Court in Bos- 


ton. She embodied the dream of her generation. 
She was in her time for “culture” what Mrs, Eddy 
was for “religion.” 


Or 


The dream of Mrs. Jack Gardner was fabricated 
slowly, according to her biographer, out of trips 
to Europe and a journey around the world. She 
was born in 1840; she thus escaped the crudities 
of the what-not period, when living rooms became 
mere albums of reminiscence, filled with picturesque 
memoranda in bric-a-brac. In 1873, Mrs. Gardner’s 
biographer dutifully notes, she purchased “a small 
landscape,” in 1875, a piece of stained glass in 
Nuremberg. In order to appreciate the importance 
of this departure, it is necessary to remember that 
John La Farge was beginning experiments with 
glass, and that Richardson was valiantly training 
a corps of stone-cutters, wood-carvers, painters, and 
sculptors during this period: after a spell of in- 
nocuous drabness, the arts were springing to life 
again in America: Eakins, Ryder, Blakelock, Fuller, 
and Homer Martin were all promising men. Mrs. 


Gardner was one of the first to take a decisive stand 


rei] 


The Golden Day 


against the threat of native art in America: she 
turned her face abroad, and invested all her inter- 
est and energy in works of art which were, culturally, 
securities—which had been on the market a long 
time, had reached par, and could be certified by 
trusty advisers, like the famous critic and appraiser, 
Mr. Bernhard Berenson. 

This hunting for pictures, statues, tapestries, 
clothes, pieces of furniture, for the epidermis and 
entrails of palaces and cottages and churches, satis- 
fied the two capital impulses of the Gilded Age: it 
gave full play to the acquisitive instinct, and, with 
the possible rise and fall of prices in even time-estab- 
lished securities, it had not a little of the cruder 
excitement of gambling in the stock-market or in 
real-estate. At the same time, it satisfied a starved 
desire for beauty and raised the pursuer an estimable 
step or two in the social scale. It would be hard, 
in fact, to find a more perfect sublimation of the 
dominant impulses of the time than those which Mrs. 
Gardner gave vent to in her search for treasures; 
and of course, she was not alone: I have selected her 
merely as a representative figure, who did with some 
discretion and intelligence things that untutored 
Western millionaires did to their great grief—as 


well as the humiliation of their descendants—or that 


[ 212 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 
titans of finance, like Mr. J. P. Morgan, or Mr. 


Henry Frick did eventually on a masterly and ex- 
haustive scale. 

The essential character of all these culture-seekers 
was that their heart lay in one age, and their life 
in another. ‘They were empty of the creative 
impulse themselves, and unwilling to nurture this 
impulse in the products of their own time. At best, 
they were connoisseurs, who could appreciate a good 
thing, if it were not too near: at worst, they were 
ragpickers and scavengers in the middens of earlier 
cultures. They wanted an outlet for their money: 
collection furnished it. They wanted beauty: they 
could appreciate it in the past,’ or in what was 
remote in space, the Orient or the Near East. They 
wanted, finally, to cover up the bleakness of their 
American heritage; and they did that, not by culti- 
vating more intensively what they had, in fertile 
contact with present and past, but by looting from 
Europe the finished objects which they lacked. Their 
conception of culture, and their type of financial 
conquest, was already perfectly expressed in the 
museum. The Louvre and the British Museum, 
which have been the patterns of every other great 
collection, are the monuments of foreign conquest: 


_ they are the pantheons to which modern imperialisms 


[ 213 ] 


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bring back the gods and graven images of their sub- 
jects. It was the triumph of the American con- 
quistadors to make the museum, filled with the scraps 
of other cultures, the repository of an irrelevant 
and abstract conception of culture for our own day 
—quite divorced from history and common experi- 
ence. 

For note this: the museum in America led inevita- 
bly to the baser sort of reproduction. There are 
two meanings to the word reproduction. One has 
to do with the results of bringing together two dif- 
ferent individualities which mingle and give birth to 
a third, unlike either and yet akin to both. In con- 
trast to this is mechanical reproduction, which 
takes a certain pattern, and repeats it a dozen, a 
hundred, a million times. Cultures flourish m the 
first kind of liwing contact; and so far as the 
museum serves this end, it exists for a worthy and 
rational purpose. When an exchange of traditions, 
however, results only in a mechanical reproduction, 
both the old culture and the new die together, for 
the finished products of an earlier age cannot take 
the place of something that must necessarily grow, 
change, modify itself, in constant intercourse with 
new desires and demands. It was in the second, 


mechanical sense that Mrs. Gardner and her cohorts 


C2147 


The Pillage of the Past 


popularized culture in America. She seized scat- 
tered objects ; lugged them to Boston; and enthroned 
them in a building which was—one hardly knows 
which to call it—a home and a museum. As a home, 
it became a pattern for the homes of rich people in 
America for a whole generation; and so, at tenth 
hand, it became a pattern for the poorest suburban 
villa, with its standardized reproductions of dressers 
and tables and carpets. Her home in Boston could, 
however, scarcely be called a domestic habitation; 
for one had only to open the doors and place a 
keeper at the entrance to convert it into a splendid 
museum. 

That is what the Gilded Age called “culture ;” 
and this is what they dreamed of. Mrs. Jack 
Gardner’s palace was the Platonic pattern which 
earlier houses anticipated, and later ones struggled 
bravely towards. Was it any wonder that Henry 
James, William James, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry 
Adams sat more or less obediently at her feet? She 
had established in Boston an atmosphere, that elusive 
smell of aristocratic purpose for the sake of which 
Henry James had clung to Europe; she had brought 
together in Fenway Court the things Henry Adams 
respectfully, learnedly, quaintly pondered in 
Europe; she had created something which had not 

[215 ] 


The Golden Day 


existed in America before, something almost indis- 
tinguishable from the original—an original becom- 
ing a littl motheaten and out-at-the-elbows—and 
she had done all this by the legitimated method of 
her age, by magnificent strokes of bounce and bar- 
gain. Was this not a happy compromise between 
the spiritual heirs of William and Henry James? 
The compromise sanctified business, because it could 
buy “‘culture,”? and culture—that is, past culture— 
was justified because it established a decent and 
highly reputable terminus for business. When Mr. 
Henry Ford restored the Wayside Inn, he was Mrs. 
Jack Gardner’s humble and deferential disciple. 
Observing all this activity from a distance, one 
can see that the transportation of objects of art 
from palaces, churches, and houses in the Old World 
to the homes and museums of the New was not, pre- 
cisely, a creative act; but this fact does not seem 
to have occurred to any one during the Gilded Age; 
nor to have bothered any one if it did; and those 
who still remain fixed in the pattern of the seventies 
carry on this pious tradition without so much as a 
quiver of doubt. The dead past remained dead: the 
raw present remained raw: one was futile, the other 
was overwhelming. That culture had ever been alive, 


or that the human actuality had ever been more than 


[216] 


The Pillage of the Past 


the brutal chaos which William James so frankly 
accepted as the chief and undisputed ingredient of 
existence—well, this no one could believe. How 
completely these two poles of activity, the practical 
and the ideal, were sundered one can see best of all, 
perhaps, in the writings of Henry Adams. No one 
in his time knew better the living reality of the past, 
particularly of the Middle Ages in France, out of 
which the museums looted their separate objects; 
no one was more intelligently interested in the phe- 
nomena of his own day, the railroad, the corpora- 
tion, the telegraph, the dynamo, the advances of 
mechanics and physics. Yet no one, for all his 
prophetic acumen, could have been more helplessly 
immersed in the stream of events, and unable to 
think himself out of them, than this quiet spectator. 
With all his knowledge of the past, he too succumbed 


to the pragmatic acquiescence. 


iB 
Henry Adams was a historian. Almost alone 
among his American contemporaries, he responded 
to Comte’s great challenge; and sought to create 
out of the mere annals and chronologies and fables 
which had once been the stock-in-trade of the his- 
[217] 


Lad 


The Golden Day 


torian, a more intelligible sequence, which would 
lead into the future as well as the past. This at- 
tempt to achieve scientific precision did not make 
him forfeit his imaginative penetration of the living 
moments of the past. His study of Mont St. Michel 
and Chartres which he began at a late period of his 
life, after having written about current events and 
the political character and fate of certain periods in 
American history was in many ways a model of 
historic reconstruction: he established the mood of 
his period, and built into the architecture and 
stained glasses of the churches he examined the 
theology of Aquinas, the science of Roger Bacon, 
the songs of the troubadours, and the simple willing 
faith of the common people. 

Since Henry Adams saw so thoroughly into the 
Middle Ages with its cult of the Virgin, one might 
fancy that he would have seen with equal insight 
into his own day, and the cult of the Dynamo. He 
was, however, so deeply immersed in his own time 
that he unconsciously read back into history all 
its preoccupations and standards. When he came 
to forecast the movement of history in his own day, 
he immediately fell into the error of location. From 
the standpoint of mechanical inventions, it was plain 


that there had been a constant acceleration of move- 


[ 218 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 
ment since, say, the Thirteenth Century. This, how- 


ever, was but one activity: had Adams projected 
himself back into the Seventeenth Century he would 
have been conscious, not of space annihilating ma- 
chines, but the steady increase in the art of fortifi- 
cation; or had he chosen painting and sculpture in- 
stead of science and machinery, he would have noted 
the steady decline in their relative volume and im- 
portance. The rate of change had not necessarily 
increased or decreased; but the departments which 
exhibited change had altered. ‘That Adams should 
have attempted to put all these complex historic 
transformations into a narrow physical formula 
dealing with the transformation of matter: and 
energy, shows how completely his environment had 
stamped him. 

William James knew better than Adams on this 
point; and when Adams published his essay on the 
Phase Rule as Applied to History, James pointed 
out that the current theories of science as to the 
eventual dissipation of energies in our universe had 
no real bearing on human history, since from the 
standpoint of life what mattered was what was done 
with these energies before they ran down—whether 
the chemicals make the pigment that go into a 
painting, or the picric acid that annihilates a com- 


[ 219] 


The Golden Day 


pany of men in warfare. Granted that the canvas 
will eventually rot away, and the men will in good 
time die: the only significant point is what has hap- 
pened in the meanwhile. Qualitatively speaking, a 
minute may hold as much as eternity; and for man 
to have existed at all may be quite as important as 
if he had an infinity of worlds to conquer, an infinity 
of knowledge to understand, and an infinity of de- 
sires to express. A hearty, an intelligent, a believ- 
ing age acts from day to day on the theory that it 
may die to-morrow. In such periods of intensifica- 
tion, as in Elizabethan England, the good may well 
die young, because, with a complete life, death is not 
a frustration. Adams, though he perhaps did not 
realize it, was a victim of the theological notion of 
eternity—the notion that our present life is signifi- 
cant or rational only if it can be prolonged. The 
test of endurance is indeed an important element in 
providing for the continuity of generations and the 
stability of effort: it can be pragmatically justified: 
but the notion that a quantitative existence in time 
is a necessary measure of worth, without which life 
is a blank, is a notion that occurs only when life is 
a blank anyway. 

Life, as Emerson said, is a matter of having good 


days. Henry Adams was discouraged: his genera- 


[220 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 
tion had had few good days. He looked forward to 


the sink of energy at zero potential, or to the opera- 
tion of the phase rule in history, as necessities which 
canceled out the pang and penalty of human efforts. 
If history moved inexorably from one phase to 
another, in the way that a solid, under suitable con- 
ditions of temperature and pressure, became a liquid, 
and then a gas, what mattered it that one was help- 
less—that one’s generation was helpless? The in- 
exorability of the law salved the laxity and the frus- 
tration. ‘To picture a whole and healthy society, 
Adams’s mind ran inevitably back to the past! As 
soon as he faced his own day, his mind jumped, as it 
were, off the page; and beyond predicting a catas- 
trophe in 1917, as Western Civilization passed from 
a mechanical to an electrical phase, he saw nothing. 
In accounting for the future, he was incapable of 
putting desire and imagination, with their capacity 
for creating form, symbol, myth, and ideal, on the 
same level as intelligence. And intelligence itself left 
only a dreary prospect! The products of human 
culture outside science and technology became for him 
little better than playthings. ‘‘A man who knew only 
what accident had taught him in the Nineteenth 
Century,” he wrote, “could know next to nothing, 


since science had got quite beyond his horizon, but 


[ 221] 


The Golden Day 
one could play with the toys of childhood, including 


Ming porcelain, salons of painting, operas and the- 
aters, beaux arts and Gothic architecture, theology 
and anarchy, in any jumble of time.” 

There in a brief picture was Henry Adams’s gen- 
eration. Its major efforts produced the grand 
achievements of science and technology. Science, 
taken as a whole, was the highest product of the 
time; by successive extensions into fields unknown to 
Bacon or Newton or Descartes, by continuous acts 
of thought, by the application of the scientific pro- 
cedure to the earth as a whole, in geology, to or- 
ganic life, in biology, and to the human community, 
in sociology, science was breaking outside its Seven- 
teenth Century shell and raising problems which the 
logical atomism of the older thought was incapable 
of even expressing, much less carrying further. As 
a world-view, the biology of the Darwinists was still 
too much tainted by Calvinist metaphysics; and the 
loose metaphors of mechanical progress, so patent to 
the observers of the Nineteenth Century, were too 
easily substituted as patterns for the life-histories of 
species and societies, whilst the mechanical technique 
of the laboratories, placed in the dull surroundings 
of the paleotechnic city, tended to put to one side 
problems which could be solved only in the field, or by 

[222] . 


The Pillage of the Past 


carrying the environment of the field into the labora- 
tory. The notions of organism, of organic environ- 
ment, of organic filiation had still to claim a place 
beside the naive externalities of the older physics. 
But with all its lack of philosophic integration, the 
acts of thought in Nineteenth Century science made 
all other acts seem fairly insignificant. Science was 
accepted as a complete organon of life; and all its 
provisionally useful descriptions became finalities. 

Henry Adams was far from seeing that “the great 
and terrible ‘physical world,’ ” as Geddes and Bran- 
ford put it, “is just a mode of the environment of 
Life,” and that desires and ends play as important 
a part in the dance of life as the matter-of-fact 
causal descriptions which alone he respected. The 
truth is, Henry Adams’s generation had forfeited 
its desires, and it was at loose ends. It treated those 
objects of art which are the symbols of man’s desires 
and masteries in earlier periods tenderly, wistfully, 
impotently. It loved its Correggios and Tintoret- 
tos; and its fingers lingered over velvets, brocades, 
and laces that happier peoples had worn; it rested 
in these old things, and knew that they were good. 
But the future had nothing to offer—except the 
knowledge that what is, is inevitable! » 

“The attempt of the American of 1900 to educate 

[ 223 ] 


The Golden Day 
the American of 2000 must be even blinder than that 


of the Congressman of 1800, except so far as he 
had learned his ignorance ... the forces would 
continue to educate and the mind would continue to 
react.” If that were all that there was to the social 
process, one might well share Henry Adams’s with- 
ered Calvinism. For him, the only desirable future 
lay in the past; what should have been a hope was a 
memory. If the creative impulse were not, in fact, 
self-renewing, if every generation did not, within its 
limits, have a fresh start, if all the old objects of 
art moldered away and nothing new ever took their 
places—then Adams might well read only a dreary 
lesson in the progress from Thirteenth Century 
Unity to Twentieth Century Multiplicity. Europe’s 
spiritual capital was being spent; even those who 
guarded it and hoarded it could not be sure that 
what they called, for example, Catholicism was more 
than a remnant of the spirit which had once inte- 
grated every aspect of life from the marriage bed to 
the tomb. Steadily, Europe’s fund of culture was 
vanishing; and its fresh acquisitions were scattered, 
insecure, far from covering every human activity. 
The American could not live long even on his most 
extravagant acquisitions of European culture. 


William James was not another Aquinas, that was 


[ 224 | 


The Pillage of the Past 


plain; nor was Howells or James another Dante; and 
the great figures Europe still produced, an Ibsen, a 
Dostoyevsky, were far from getting complete sus- 
tenance from their own day; they turned away from 
it, rather, to folklore, philology, and the ancient 
institutions of religion—the dream of a Messiah, a 
new Christ or a newer Superman. Neither the 
American nor the European had more than a bare 


vestige of a faith or a plan of life. 


Yet we have Gods, for even our strong nerve 
Falters before the Energy we own. 
Which shall be Master? Which of us shall serve? 
Which wear the fetters? Which shall bear 
the crown? 


Impotent to answer his own questions, Henry 
Adams was still intelligent enough to ask them. But 
he did not look for the answer in the only place 
where it may be found: he looked for it in the stars, 
in the annals of invention, in the credulous, mythic- 
materialistic past. He forgot to look for it in the 
human mind, which had created these idola, as it had 
created Moloch and Baal and Mammon; and which 
might turn away from its creations, as the Israelites 
turned away from the gods of the Philistines, once 
their prophets gave them a glimpse of a more organic 
and life-fulfilling world. 

[ 225 ] 


The Golden Day 


Vv 


The criticism and completion of these two phases 
of American development came in the first decade 
of the Twentieth Century. The instrument of this 
criticism, Mr. George Santayana, was born in 
Madrid and educated in Harvard and Berlin. He 
brought to the American scene and its characteristic 
vocations an aloof inquisitiveness: the very absence 
of the things in America which gave contour and 
significance to European society redoubled their 
hold upon the mind of this spiritual exile: one could 
almost describe what was absent in America by 
enumerating the ideas and cultural interests that 
found their way into his philosophy. 

What was the nature of the sense of beauty? 
That was a question that William James never took 
up again in his philosophic writings once he had 
silenced the urge in his private life. What was the 
significance of the tragic poets? That, too, was an 
unseemly question in a country that read Lowell 
and John Muir. Finally, in the Life of Reason, Mr. 
Santayana broke away from the two main philo- 
sophic traditions of America, the highbrow and the 
lowbrow, the idealist and the empiricist, and re- 


turned to those richer pastures in which Plato, 


[ 226 ] 


The Pillage of the Past 


Aristotle, and Lucretius had browsed. Far more 
successfully than William James, Mr. Santayana 
brought together the tender-minded and the tough- 
minded. He did this, not by declaring the existence 
of a province in which a decision must be made, not 
scientifically justifiable, but by giving a context to 
both science and idealism, or, to use the older terms, 
both physics and dialectics. If he dismissed ideal- 
ism as an effort to re-create the whole world, and to 
seize upon the entire pageant as a product of mind 
—of man’s mind (solipsism) or of God’s mind (abso- 
Jutism)—he restored idealism as a mode of thinking 
creatively, as the mode in which art and ritual take 
on an independent existence and create a new home 
for the spirit. Thus taken, idealism is not the will- 
to-believe but the will-to-create: it does not lead to a 
respite from practical activities but to a keener and 
intenser struggle, in a different medium. This 
struggle is not inimical to science; but it does not 
look upon the domain of science as the entire prov- 
ince of human thought. 

Philosophically, the pillage of the past came to 
an end with its consummation in The Life of Rea- 
son. It has continued as a fact, and covered wider 
areas, but as an idea it could go no farther: that 


series of volumes was a perfect exhibition of culture: 


[ 227 | 


The Golden Day 


it was in actuality what every other act of culture 
was only in vague intention—a recovery of the past, 
the whole past, particularly the remoter Aigean 
and Mediterranean past. William James said of 
the Life of Reason that it was grounded very deep, 
and would probably be looked upon as a classic by 
future generations: the fact that it has waited long 
for more than mere recognition shows the distance 
it went beyond the current prepossessions of the 
pragmatists and the culture-seekers. Mr. Santa- 
yana’s thought was in a deep sense traditional ; it was 
also, like every vital tradition, capable of bearing 
new fruits. In its justness of selection, its balance, 
its completeness, it was something that the Museums 
of the Gilded Age were quite unable to achieve within 
their own walls: it is still, however, a model of what 
they may reasonably aspire towards. Mr. Santa- 
yana’s. thoughts were not acquisitions but posses- 
sions; they were meant not merely to be exhibited 
but to be shared and absorbed. 

In its richness of material, Mr. Santayana’s phi- 
losophy had much in common with Emerson’s; neither 
was content with an impoverished dialectic, and the 
academic philosophers, whose chief glory is to make 
bread out of straw, have frequently looked upon 
both thinkers as little better than amateurs and 

[ 228 |] 


The Pillage of the Past 
dilettantes, But, unlike Emerson, Mr. Santayana 


had no roots in his own day and people; and this is 
perhaps the source of his weakness—his vanity and 
his preciousness. Such roots as he had grew out of 
the same Boston of the nineties which created Mrs. 
Jack Gardner’s museum. Hence Mr. Santayana’s 
resentful attitude towards the original and the con- 
temporary: hence, too, his complete failure of in- 
tellectual sympathy, to say nothing of an occasional 
loss of urbanity, in dealing with a Browning, a Whit- 
man, a Bergson. Catholicity is something more than 
an arranged gesture of the mind; it must grow out 
of a life that is itself complete. “Could a better 
system prevail in our lives,” Mr. Santayana once 
wrote, “a better order would establish itself in our 
thinking.” Lacking such a life, yet straining after 
it, it is no wonder Mr. Santayana’s thought bears a 
taint of priggishness and artful effort: it was only, 
as it were, by a special exercise that he was able to 
preserve in the affairs of the mind an attitude so 
foreign to his milieu and his contemporaries. 

If the Life of Reason does not impel us toward a 
new order in our own day, it nevertheless shows 
clearly what the great efforts of culture produced 
in the past. We cannot, indeed, make the ways of 
other cultures our ways; but by entering into all 


[ 229 ] 


The Golden Day 


their life in the spirit, our ways will become more 
deeply humanized, and will, in fresh modes, con- 
tinue the living past. When we are integrated, we 
grow like the tree: the solid trunk of the past, and 
the cambium layer where life and growth take place, 
are unified and necessary to each other. If the 
pragmatists had read this lesson from history, they 
would not have sunk entirely into the contemporary 
scene; and if the pillagers of the past had realized 
this truth, their efforts to establish a background 
would not have been so superficial. 


[230] 


CHAPTER SIX 


THE SHADOW OF THE MUCK-RAKE 





Wirt the passing of the frontier in 1890, one 
special source of American experience dried up: the 
swell which between 1860 and 1890 had reached the 
Pacific Coast and had cast ashore its flotsam in a 
Mark Twain, a Bret Harte, a Muir, now retreated: 
the land-adventure was over. As a result, the in- 
terest in the industrial process itself intensified: the 
Edisons and Carnegies came to take the place in the 
popular imagination once occupied by Davy Crock- 
ett and Buffalo Bill. In books written for children 
there is a certain cultural lag which records the 
change of the previous generation very faithfully 
The earliest children’s books of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury were moral tracts; they recorded the moment of 
Puritanism. ‘The dime novel came in in the sixties, 
to echo the earliest exploits of the bad man and the 
outlaw; this was supplemented in the seventies by 
the books of Horatio Alger, written purely in the 
ideology of the Eighteenth Century, preaching self- 
help, thrift, success. In the late nineties a new set 
of children’s books dealt with the frontiers and the 

[233] 


The Golden Day 


Indian fights of the previous generation, to be sup- 
planted, finally, by stories in which mechanical ex- 
periment and exploit predominated. Here is a brief 
revelation of our dominant idola. 

With the concentration on machine industry went 
a similar concentration in finance. The eighties and 
nineties were the decades of great improvements in 
the steel industry, in stockyards, and in the applica- 
tions of electricity ; they also witnessed the first rude 
experiments with the internal combustion engine, 
which paved the way for the automobile and the 
aeroplane. Unfortunately, finance did not lag be- 
hind technology; and the directors of finance found 
methods of disposing of the unearned increment de- 
rived from land, scientific knowledge, social organ- 
ization, and the common technological processes, for 
the benefit of the absentee owner rather than for the 
common welfare of the community. 

The note of the period was consolidation. The 
great captains of industry controlled the fabrica- 
tion of profits with a military discipline: they waged 
campaigns against their competitors which needed 
only the actual instruments of warfare to equal that 
art in ruthlessness; they erected palisades around 
their works; they employed private condottieri to 
police their establishments; they planted spies 

[234] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


among their workers; and they viewed, doubtless 
with satisfaction, the building of armories in the 
big cities where the State Militia could be housed in 
times of stress to preserve “law and order.” Her- 
bert Spencer looked to industry to supplant militar- 
ism; he had not reckoned that industry itself might 
be militarized, any more than he had seen that war- 
fare might eventually be mechanized; but between 
1890 and 1920 all these things came to pass. The 
workers themselves, after various efforts to achieve 
solidarity in a Socialist Party or in the Knights 
of Labor, met the challenge by adopting a pecuniary 
strategy: but unlike their financial antagonists, the 
captains of the American Federation of Labor per- 
mitted themselves to be handicapped by jurisdic- 
tional disputes and factional jealousies; and impor- 
tant new industries, like oil and steel, languished 
without even their modicum of financial protection. 

What happened in industry happened likewise in 
all the instrumentalities of the intellectual life. This 
same period witnessed the vast mechanical accretion 
of Columbia University and Harvard, and the estab- 
lishment of Leland Stanford (railroads) and the 
University of Chicago (oil). Stanley Hall recorded 
in his autobiography, with a noble restraint, the sort 


of ruthlessness with which President Harper of 


[ 235] 


The Golden Day 


Chicago made away with the corps of instructors and 
professors Hall had gathered together at Clark Uni- 
versity: Mr. Rockefeller never got hold of oil wells 
and pipe lines with more adroit piracy. The con- 
centration of publishing houses and magazines in 
New York was a natural accompaniment of the 
financial process. 

This consolidation and concentration completed 
in industry what the Civil War had begun in politics. 
The result was a pretty complete regimentation of 
our American cities and regions. While the process 
was fostered in the name of Efficiency, the name re- 
fers only to the financial returns, and not to the 
industrial or social method. Without doubt large 
efficiencies were achieved in the manufacture of 
monopoly profits, through special privilege, corpo- 
rate consolidation, and national advertising; but the 
apologists for this regime were driven to express all 
these triumphs in the sole terms in which they were 
intelligible—money. In spite of its wholesale con- 
centration upon invention and manufacture, in spite 
of its sacrifice of every other species of activity to 
utilitarian enterprise, this society did not even fulfill 
its own boast: it did not produce a sufficient quan- 
tity of material goods. Judged purely by its own 
standards, industrialism had fallen short. The one 


[ 236 ] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


economist who devoted himself to explaining this 
curious failure, Mr. Thorstein Veblen, was dismissed 
as a mere satirist, because he showed that the actual 
economies of machine industry were forfeited to pe- 
cunlary aggrandizement, and through a wry stand- 
ard of consumption—which confused wealth with 
pecuniary respectability and human vitality with 
keeping up appearances. For the controllers of in- 
dustry, financial imperialism produced considerable 
profits; for the large part of the population it 
resulted in a bare subsistence, made psychologically 
tolerable by meretricious luxuries, once the sole 
property of a higher pecuniary caste. The Pitts- 
burgh Survey ably documented current indus- 
trialism in every civic aspect; but it merely set down 
in cold print actualities which were open to any one 
who would take the trouble to translate bank ac- 
counts and annual incomes into their concrete 
equivalents. 

It is no special cause for grief or wonder that the 
Army Intelligence tests finally rated the product of 
these depleted rural regions or of this standardized 
education, this standardized factory regime, this 
standardized daily routine as below the human norm 
in intelligence: the wonder would rather have been if 
any large part of the population had achieved a 

287A 


The Golden Day 


full human development. The pioneer, at worst, had 
only been a savage; but the new American had fallen 
a whole abyss below this: he was becoming an au- 
tomaton. Well might Mark Twain ask in despair, 
What is Man? “I have seen the granite face of 


bd 66 


Hawthorne,” exclaimed Henry James, Senior, “and 
feel what the new race may be!’ In less than two 
generations that feeling for a new human strength 
and dignity had been wiped out. ‘The popular hero 
of the time was that caricature of humanity, a he- 
man, shrill, vituperative, platitudinous, equivocating. 
In art, the memorable figures, the human ones, were 
caricatures: Mr. Dooley, Potash and Perlmutter, 
Weber and Fields. They alone had a shape, a flavor. 

The chief imaginative expression of this period 
came from men who were caught in the maw of the 
Middle West; and who, whatever their background, 
had been fed with the spectacle of this callow yet 
finished civilization, the last word in mechanical con- 
trivance, scarcely the first faint babble in culture— 
sentimental yet brutal, sweet but savage. F. P. 
Dunne, George Ade, Ed Howe, Hamlin Garland, 
Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, Frank Nor- 
ris, Robert Herrick—these were the writers who 
caught and expressed the spirit of this interreg- 
num; and nearly all of these men had sprung out of 


[ 238 ] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 
the Middle West, or had had at least a temporary 


resting place in Chicago during their formative 
years. Jack London and Upton Sinclair belonged 
to this group in spirit, if not in locality. These 
writers departed from the complacency of the Gilded 
Age, if not from its pragmatic bias; they challenged 
the esoteric culture that attempted to snuggle on 
the ancient bosom of Europe in the name of a coarse 
but upstanding vigor derived completely from the 
life around them. Born between the close of the 
Civil War and 1880, by the place of their birth they 
had inherited the memories of the pioneer, by the 
time of their birth, those of industrialism and the 
new immigrant. Mawkish middle-class writers, like 
Meredith Nicholson and Booth Tarkington saw this 
life through the genuine lace curtains of respectable 
parlors: but the more virile representatives of this 
period knew it from the saloon to the stockyard, 
from the darkest corner of the cellar to the top of 


the new skyscrapers. 


II 


The shadow of the muck-rake fell over this period. 
That was to its credit. But business went on as 


usual and the muck remained. ‘Those who defended 


[ 2389 | 


The Golden Day 


the sweating of labor, the building of slums, the 
bribery of legislatures, the piratical conduct of 
finance, the disorderly and short-sighted heaping up 
of very evanescent material goods were inclined to 
blame the muck-rake for the existence of the muck, 
just as they would blame the existence of labor 
agitators for the troubles they attempt to combat— 
which is very much like blaming the physician for 
the plague. As a result of the muck-rake, white- 
wash cans and deodorizing solutions came into gen- 
eral use: philanthropic bequests became more numer- 
ous and more socialized; social work expanded from 
the soup kitchens and down-and-out shelters to so- 
cial settlements; and the more progressive factories 
even began to equip themselves with gymnasiums, 
lunchrooms, orchestras, and permanent nurses. If 
modern industrial society had in fact been in the 
blissful state its proponents always claimed, it would 
be hard indeed to account for all these remedial 
organizations ; but in the widening of the concept of 
“charity” the claims of the critics, from Owen to 
Marx, were steadily being recognized. 

Frank Norris, in The Octopus and The Pit, Up- 
ton Sinclair in The Jungle, and Jack London in the 
numerous biographic projections he called novels, 
faced the brutal industrialism of the period: they 

[ 240 7] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


documented its workings in the wheatfield, the prison, 
the stockyard, the stock exchange, and the vast 
purlieus of la ville tentaculaire; Mr. Robert Her- 
rick, a little more restrained but just as keenly 
awakened, added to the picture. The work that 
these men accomplished could scarcely be called a 
spiritual catharsis; for it left the reader the same 
man that it found him; it was rather a regurgita- 
tion. To their credit, they confronted the life about 
them: they neither fled to Europe nor fancied that 
all American aspects. were smiling ones. But these 
vast cities and vacant countrysides were not some- 
thing that they took in and assimilated and worked 
over into a new pattern: it did not, in fact, occur 
to these writers that the imagination had an impor- 
tant part to play in the process. They were re- 
porters, or, if they thought of themselves more pre- 
tentiously, social scientists ; their novels were photo~ 
graphs, or at any rate campaign documents. 

With unflinching honesty, these novelists dug into 
the more putrid parts of modern American society 
and brought to light corruption, debasement, bribery, 
greed, and foul aims. Fight corruption! Combat 
greed! Reform the system! Their conclusions, im- 
plicit or expressed, could all be put in some terse 
admonition. They took these symptoms of a deep 

[241] 


The Golden Day 


social maladjustment to be the disease itself; they 
sought to reach them by prayer and exhortation, 
carried on by street corner evangelists, by legislative 
action—or, if necessary, by a revolutionary uprising 
in the fashion of 1789. 

Perhaps the most typical writers of this period 
were implicated in political programs for reform 
and revolution. In their reaction against the vast 
welter of undirected forces about them, they sought 
to pave the way for political changes which would 
alter the balance of political power, drive out the 


“predatory interests,” 


and extend to industry itself 
the republican system of government in which the 
nation had been conceived. Upton Sinclair’s The 
Industrial Republic, which followed close on his 
great journalistic beat, The Jungle—the smell of 
tainted meat, which accompanied the United States 
Army to Cuba, still hung in the air—was typical of 
what was good and what was inadequate in these 
programs. To Mr. Sinclair, as to Edward Bellamy 
some twenty years earlier, the Social Commonwealth, 
full-panoplied, was just behind the horizon. He 
was hazardous enough to predict its arrival within 
a decade. With Mr. Sinclair’s aim to establish a 
more rational industrial order, in which function 
would supplant privilege, in which trained intelli- 


[242] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


gence would take the place of inheritance, in which 
the welfare of the whole community would be the 
prime end of every economic activity, I am in hearty 
sympathy. What was weak in Mr. Sinclair’s pro- 
gram was the assumption that modern industrial 
society possessed all the materials essential to a 
good social order. On this assumption, all that was 
necessary was a change in power and control: the 
Social Commonwealth would simply diffuse and ex- 
tend all the existing values. These writers accepted 
the trust, and wanted the principle of monopoly 
extended: they accepted the bloated city, and wanted 
its subways and tenements socialized, as well as its 
waterworks; there were even authoritarian social- 
ists, like Daniel De Leon, who believed that the cor- 
porate organization of workers, instead of being 
given added responsibility as guilds, would disap- 
pear entirely from the scene with the Socialist State. 
Concealed under revolutionary phrases, these critics 
could envisage only a bourgeois order of society, in 
which every one would have the comforts and con- 
veniences of the middle classes, without the suffering, 
toil, anxiety, and frustration known to the unskilled 
worker. 

What was lacking in such views was a con- 
crete image of perfection: the “‘scientific’”’ social- 


[ 243 ] 


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ists distrusted utopias, and so made a utopia of the 
existing order. In attack, in criticism, they did able 
work; but when it came to offering a genuine alter- 
native, their picture became a negative one: industry 
without millionaires, cities without graft, art without 
luxury, love without sordid calculation. ‘They were 
ready to upset every aspect of modern industrial 
society except the fragmentary culture which had 
brought it into existence. 

Now, were the diffusion of existing values all that 
was required of a better social order, the answer 
of capitalism was canny and logical: the existing 
regime could diffuse values, too. Did not bank ac- 
counts spread—and Ford cars—and movies—and 
higher wages in the skilled trades? What more 
could one want? Why risk one’s neck for a Social 
Commonwealth when, as long as privilege was given 
a free hand, it would eventually provide the same 
things? Thus the socialist acceptance of the cur- 
rent order as a “necessary stage,” and the socialist 
criticism, “Capitalism does not go far enough” have 
been answered by the proposition that it actually 
does go farther: the poor do not on the whole get 
poorer, but slowly march upward in the social scale. 

The evils of privilege and irresponsible power in 


America were of course real; but the essential 


[244] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


poverty of America was a qualitative poverty, one 
which cut through the divisions of rich and poor; 
and it has been this sort of poverty which has pre- : 
vented us from projecting in the imagination a more 
excellent society. Life was more complicated in 
America but not more significant; life was richer 
in material goods but not in creative energies. These 
eager and relentless journalists were unaware of 
the necessity for establishing different kinds of goods 
than the existing ones; they had no notion of other 
values, other modes, other forms of activity than 
those practiced by the society around them. The 
result is that their works did not tend to lead out 
of the muddle. ‘Their novels were interesting as 
social history; but they did not have any formative 
effect: for they sentimentalized the worker to the 
extent of always treating him as a victim, and 
never making out of him a hero. The only attempt 
to create a heroic portrait of the worker came 
towards the end of the muck-raking period; it was 
that of Beaut McGregor in Sherwood Anderson’s 
Marching Men, a half-wrought figure in an imper- 
fect book. 

What the American worker needed in literature 
was discipline, confidence, heroic pictures, and large 
aims: what he got even from the writers who preached 


[ 245 |] 


The Golden Day 


his emancipation was the notion that his distressing 
state was only the result of the capitalist’s villainy 
and his own virtues, that the mysterious external 
forces of social evolution were bound eventually to 
lift him out of his mean and subservient condition 
and therefore he need not specially prepare himself 
to bring about this outcome—and that anyway the 
odds were always against him! It is doubtful 
whether this analysis could be called accurate 
science; it certainly was not high literature. For 
all the effect that these painstaking pictures had 
in lifting the worker onto a more active plane of 
manhood, one would willingly trade the whole litera- 
ture for a handful of good songs. I am not sure 
but that the rowdy, impoverished lyrics of the wob- 
blies were not more stirring and formative—and that 


they may last longer, too. 


Il 


There were two writers who stood outside this 
gallery: Jack London, who created his own Super- 
man, and Mr. Theodore Dreiser, who depicted the 
whole American scene without any propagandist bias. 
They do not alter the contours of the picture; they 
merely show how futile the will-to-power and the 


[ 246 | 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


desire to face facts became, when pushed to their 
conclusions without reference to rational ends. 
Jack London came to maturity in the nineties; 
and after a career as oyster pirate in San Francisco 
Bay, as a tramp with Coxey’s army, as an adven- 
turer in Alaska, after participating in all the coarse 
and wearing manual labor that may offer itself to a 
willing lad, he acquired the scraps of an education, 
and went in for writing, as an easier kind of liveli- 
hood. He quickly achieved popularity. He had 
only to tell his life over again—to make a story of 
it in the newspaper sense—to feed the romanticism 
of the big urban populations which now began to 
swallow the five, ten, and fifteen cent magazines. 
London became a sort of traveling salesman of 
literature, writing to his market, offering “red 
blood” and adventure to people who were confined 
to ledgers, ticker-tapes, and Sunday picnics. He 
brandished the epithet socialist as a description of 
himself and his ideas; but he was gullible enough 
to swallow Kipling’s doctrine of the White Man’s 
Burden, believed in the supremacy of the Nordics, 
who were then quaintly called Anglo-Saxons, and 
clung to socialism, it would seem, chiefly to give an 
additional luster of braggadocio and romanticism 


to his career; for socialism, to London’s middle-class 


[ 247 ] 


The Golden Day 


contemporaries, was an adventure more desperate 
than the rush for gold in the Klondike. Superficially 
London perhaps believed in the socialist cause; but 
his personal activities had scarcely the chemical 
trace of a public interest in them; and one need 
only go below the surface to see that he betrayed his 
socialism in all his ingrained beliefs, particularly, his 
belief in success, and in his conception of the Super- 
man, 

The career of the Superman in America is an 
instructive spectacle. He sprang, this overman, 
out of the pages of Emerson; it was Emerson’s way 
of expressing the inexhaustible evolutionary pos- 
sibilities of a whole race of Platos, Michelangelos, 
and Montaignes. Caught up by Nietzsche, and 
colored by the dark natural theology Darwin had 
inherited from Malthus, the Superman became the 
highest possibility of natural selection: he served 
as a symbol of contrast with the codperative or 
“slave morality” of Christianity. The point to 
notice is that in both Emerson and Nietzsche the 
Superman is a higher type: the mark of his genius is 
the completer development of his human capacities. 
London, like his whole generation, scarcely knew of 
Emerson’s existence: one has only to note the way 
in which Frank Norris respectfully refers to “great” 

[248 J 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 
New England writers like Lowell and Whittier to 


know that he had probably not read even these minor 
writers. London, however, seized the suggestion of 
the Superman and attempted to turn it into a 
reality. And what did he become? Nothing less 
than a preposterous bully, like Larssen, the Sea- 
Wolf, like Burning Daylight, the miner and adven- 
turer, like his whole gallery of brutal and brawny 
men—creatures blessed with nothing more than the 
gift of a magnificent animality, and the absence of a 
social code which would prevent them from inflicting 
this gift upon their neighbors. In short, London’s 
Superman was little more than the infantile dream 
of the messenger boy or the barroom tough or the 
nice, respectable clerk whose muscles will never quite 
stand up under strain. He was the social platitude 
of the old West, translated into a literary epigram. 

What London called “white logic,” which he 
sought to erase by drink, was the perception that 
life, as he had found it, was empty. The logic was 
faultless; the insight was just; but as a writer and 
a mythmaker it remained for him to fill it up, to 
use the materials he had gathered as the painter 
uses his pigments, to create a more significant pat- 
tern. To do this he was impotent: hence his “scien- 
tific’ determinism. “You made me what I am 


[ 249 ] 


The Golden Day 


to-day: I hope you’re satisfied.” This, in the words 
of a popular ballad, was the retort of the handi- 
capped and limited American artist to his environ- 
ment. He held a mirror up to society; and to read 
the mind of a London or a Dreiser is to read what 
was passing in the streets about him; or, vice-versa, 
to record as in a lens the dull parade of men, women, 
factories, downtowns, waterfronts, suburbs, rail- 
roads, murders, lusts, connubialities, successes, chi- 
canes, is to read their novels. 

The bewildered chaos of the sons of the pioneer, 
as they reached their destination and recoiled into 
muzzy reflection, is best illustrated, I think, in the 
novels of Mr. Theodore Dreiser. Mr. Dreiser has 
a power and reach which set him well above his 
immediate contemporaries. Across the panorama 
of the mid-American prairie, where Chicago sits like 
the proverbial spider in the midst of her steel web, 
Mr. Dreiser flung his canvas; his Philadelphia, too, 
is spiritually part of that Chicago. Huge figures, 
titans of finance, who practice “art for art’s sake” 
in the pursuit of money, or “geniuses” in art, who 
are business men in everything except their medium, 
dominate the scene; they wander about, these 
Cowperwoods and Witlas, like dinosaurs in the ooze 
of industrialism. Mr. Dreiser’s books reflect this 


[ 250 | 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


bulk and multitudinousness: they are as full of 
details as a day’s shopping: with a vast hippo- 
potamus yawn he swallowed the minutie of Amer- 
ica’s physical activities: you might find in his books 
the wages of laundry wagon drivers in 1894, the 
style of women’s gloves in 1902, how one cashes a 
check at a bank, the interior arrangements of a 
modern hotel, the details of a criminal prosecution. 

By what means does he handle this material? 
What makes it significant? There are no means; or 
rather, they are those of the census taker, whose 
schedule covers everything. There is a superficial 
resemblance between Dreiser and Zola; but Zola, 
being the product of the old and high civilization 
of Provence, had some conception of what a humane 
life might be, and not for a second was he uncon- 
scious of his purpose to criticize the church, to 
portray the evils of drunkenness, to expose the 
brutalities of the farm or the steel works: he had the 
advantage of describing a society that had known 
better days, and these days were his implicit point 
of reference. What can we say of Mr. Dreiser? He 
is simply bewildered. He is attracted to anything 
that exhibits size, power, sexual lust; believing in 
these things alone, he is critical of any institution 


or idea that stands in their way. His heroes know 


[ 251 ] 


The Golden Day 


what it is to have material success and to conquer 
women; but their conquests lead nowhere and de- 
velop into nothing. One thing bobs up; another falls 
down; and in the long run none of their affairs, 
financial or sexual, are of any consequence, It is 
a picture of society: yes: but so is the Sunday news- 
paper. 

One wonders about the curious naiveté of Mr. 
Dreiser’s mind. He is free from conventional re- 
straints; he has the healthy indifference of the hon- 
est physician who encounters everything in the day’s 
work. He thinks other people ought to be free, too; 
and he can scarcely see that there are any conse- 
quences in sexual passion, for example, except a 
conflict with the formalities of the social code. ‘The 
reaction of the wife of the “Genius” to his adven- 
tures with other women seem to the hero irrelevant ; 
they are due, not to the inherent psychology of the 
relationship, but to her being conventionally brought 
up! In his callowness, in his heavy platitudes, in 
his superficial revolt against “morality,” Mr. 
Dreiser was but the forerunner of a host of maga- 
zines that live on “confessions,” fabricated or real, 
of ordinary men and women, without any more sense 
of direction or purpose or humane standards than 


Mr. Dreiser’s own heroes and heroines. His novels 


[252] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


are human documents; so is a pair of shoestrings, 
a torn glove, a footprint. But the chief thing they 
give evidence of is the total evaporation of values in 
the modern industrial environment, the feebleness 
of the protestant morality, which was all that kept 
the social bond from breaking entirely in the old 
days; and the total lack, in this crass new life, of any 
meanings or relationships beyond the raw fact. 
Culture in its many ramifications is a working 
over of the raw fact. Just as eating, among civil- 
ized peoples, is not a mere hacking and gnawing at 
flesh and bones, but an occasion for sociability and 
civil ceremonies, to the extent that the ceremony 
frequently becomes as important as the fact itself 
and works out into a separate drama, so every act 
tends to be done, not just for its own sake, but for 
the social values that accompany it: the taste, the 
conversation, the wit, the sociability are esthetic 
filaments that bind men together and make life more 
pleasing. To the extent that these shared meanings 
come into existence and spread over all the details 
of the day’s activities, a community is cultured; to 
the extent that they disappear, or have no place, 
it is barbarous. The hurried business man who 
snatches his lunch, snatches his girl in the same way: 


his lust is as quickly exhausted as his appetite; and 
[ 258 J 


The Golden Day 


he looks around for a new stimulus, as he might 
scan the menu for a new dish. Experience of this 
sort tends to be truncated; it remains on the level 
of the physical fact, and the physical fact becomes 
dull and unimportant, and must be succeeded by new 
stimuli, which eventually become stale, too. Culture, 
on the other hand, implies the possibilities of repeti- 
tion. Like fine poetry or music, the hundredth occa- 
sion often finds an act as interesting as the first. 
If this were not so, life would be intolerable; and 
because it is so, it is no wonder that the barbarians 
Mr. Dreiser portrays find all their adventures stale, 
and all their different achievements tending towards 
a deadly sameness. ‘Their lives are empty, because 
lust and power are empty, so long as they do not 
contrive situations in which power is turned to ra- 
tional ends and produces efficient industries, fine 
cities, and happy communities—or sexual passion 
its friendship, its salon, its home, its theater in 
which the private interest becomes sublimated and 


amplified into more agreeable forms of social life. 


IV 


Among the group of New Englanders established 
in Chicago at the beginning of the century, Mr. 
[254] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


John Dewey was perhaps the most distinguished. 
Among all the writers of this milieu and period, he 
expressed in his philosophy something more than the 
mere welter of existence. From the beginning Mr. 
Dewey was bracketed with William James as one of 
the founders and developers of pragmatism, or as 
he himself preferred to call it, instrumentalism; but, 
in spite of similarities of approach, there were dif- 
ferences between these men which at bottom reflected 
the intervening of almost a generation between the 
birth of James and that of Dewey. 

William James had a style. Dreiser, Dewey, the 
commanding writers of the early Chicago school, 
were at one on this point: they had no style: they 
wrote in a language which, however concrete its 
objects, was as fuzzy and formless as lint. There 
is a homely elegance in James’s writing, a beauty 
in the presentation of the thought, even if the con- 
cept of beauty was absent from his philosophy; in 
the earlier writing of Dewey, on the other hand, one 
looks in vain for either the concept or its literary 
equivalent. ‘The comedown is serious. Style is the 
indication of a happy mental rhythm, as a firm 
grip and a red cheek are of health. Lack of style 
is a lack of organic connection: Dreiser’s pages are 


as formless as a dumpheap: Mr. Dewey’s pages are 


[255] 


The Golden Day 


as depressing as a subway ride—they take one to 
one’s destination, but a little the worse for wear. 
Mr. Randolph Bourne once characterized this 
quality of Mr. Dewey’s mind as “protective colora- 
tion;” and the phrase is accurate enough if one 
means that the creature has identified himself in 
shape and color with his environment. No one has 
plumbed the bottom of Mr. Dewey’s philosophy who 
does not feel in back of it the shapelessness, the 
faith in the current go of things, and the general 
utilitarian idealism of Chicago—the spirit which 
produced the best of the early skyscrapers, the 
Chicago exposition, Burnham’s grandiose city plan, 
the great park and playground system, the clotted 
disorder of interminable slums, and the vitality of a 
handful of experimental schools. 

Mr. Dewey’s philosophy represents what is still 
positive and purposeful in that limited circle of ideas 
in which the American mind was originally born; he 
is at home in the atmosphere of protestantism, with 
its emphasis upon the réle of intelligence in morals; 
in science, with its emphasis upon procedure, tech- 
nique, and deliberate experiment; and he embraces 
technology with the same esthetic faith that Mr. 
Henry Ford embraces it. Above all, Mr. Dewey 
believes in democracy; that was at the bottom of his 


[ 256 | 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


many acceptances of the milieu; what had been pro- 
duced by the mass of men must somehow be right, 
and must somehow be more significant than the 
interests which occupy only a minority! In Mr. 
Dewey the American mind completed, as it were, its 
circle, and returned to its origin, amplifying, by 
the experience of a century, the essential interests of 
an Edwards, a Franklin, a Paine. 

To the things that stand outside this circle of 
ideas, Mr. Dewey has been essentially antagonistic, 
or at least unsympathetic. He has been a severe 
and just critic of conventional education; and he 
has undermined conceptions of philosophy, art, and 
religion which represented merely the mummified 
experiences and aims of other generations: but his 
criticisms have been conducted with an unqualified 
belief in the procedures of common sense and tech- 
nology, because these procedures have led to prac- 
tical “results.” Happiness, too, for him “is found 
only in success ; but success means succeeding, getting 
forward, moving in advance. It is an active process, 
not a passive outcome.” ‘That is quite another defi- 
nition of happiness than the equilibrium, the point 
of inner rest, which the mystic, for example, seeks; 
but for Mr. Dewey a less active kind of happi- 
ness always tends to be “totally separated from re- 


[ 257 |] 


The Golden Day 


newal of the spirit.” In other words, happiness 
means for Mr. Dewey what it meant for the pioneer: 
a preparation for something else. He scarcely can 
conceive that activity may follow the mode of the 
circle or the pendulum, rather than the railroad 
train. 

In spite of all these opacities, it would be absurd 
to ignore the great service that instrumentalism has 
performed; for it has crystallized in philosophic 
form one of the great bequests of science and modern 
technology: the respect for cooperative thinking and 
for manual activity—experiment and invention—in 
guiding and controlling this process. The notion 
that action by itself was undignified and foreign to 
the life of the mind was, of course, a leisure class 
superstition. Creative thought is not a polite shuf- 
fling of observations, memories, and a priori logic: 
that is but one phase of the whole process: man 
thinking is not a spectatorial “mind” but a com- 
pletely operative human organism, using in various 
degrees and at various stages every part of his 
organism, down to his viscera, and every available 
form of tool, from the finger which might trace a 
geometrical theorem in the sand to the logarithm 
table or the electric furnace. The otiose, leisure- 


class notion of thinking is that it is the reflection 


[258] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


of what one reads in a book or gets by hearsay from 
other people: the great achievement of the scientific 
method was to supplant the scholar’s chair—which 
does in fact peculiarly serve one phase of the think- 
ing-process—by the work of the field and the 
laboratory, by exploration, observation, mechanical 
contrivance, exact measurement, and codperative 
intercourse. With the introduction of the scientific 
method, men began to think consciously as whole 
human beings: the worker, the rambler, the traveler, 
the explorer, enlarged the scope of the mind. If 
this movement was accompanied by some loss, per- 
) haps, in that part of the thinking process covered 
by dialectics, the gain was nevertheless a great one. 

Mr. Dewey seized upon this achievement and 
brought out its significance admirably. Its implica- 
tions should not be neglected. According to Dewey, 
thought is not mature until it has passed into 
action: the falsity of philosophy is that it has fre- 
quently dealt with ideas which have no such issue, 
while the weakness of the practical world is that its 
actions are unintelligent routine, the issue of an 
unreflective procedure. Action is not opposed to 
ideas: the means are not one thing, and the final 
result of attending to them quite another: they are 
not kitchen maids and parlor guests, connected only 

[ 259 ] 


The Golden Day 
by being in the same house. Means which do not 


lead to significant issues are illiberal and brutal; 
issues which do not take account of the means neces- 
sary to fulfill them are empty and merely “well- 
meaning.” A transcendentalism which takes such 
high ground poor humanity cannot stand on it, or 
an empiricism which takes such low ground that it 
introduces no excellence into brute existence—both 
these things are inimical to life, and absurd—and 
it has been Mr. Dewey’s great merit to point out this 
absurdity, and so open the way to a more complete 
kind of activity, in which facts and values, actuali- 
ties and desires, achieve an active and organic unity. 

In its flexibility, in its experimentalism, in its em- 
phasis upon the ineptitude of any finality, except 
that involved in the process of living itself, with the 
perpetual intercourse between the organism and its 
implicated environment, Mr. Dewey’s philosophy 
expresses a continuously formative part of our 
American experience. For the European, roughly 
speaking, history is what prevents anything new 
or fresh from being done. It needed the dislocation 
of settling a New World to discover a to-morrow not 
actually given in a host of yesterdays. In so far as 
Mr. Dewey has given expression to these things, his 
work has been to the good: it is not that flexibility 

[ 260 |] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


and experiment are good in themselves: there are 
times when it is necessary to be as stiff as a ramrod 
and as dogmatic as a Scotch dominie—but these 
things represent a genuine addition to the European 
experience of life, and to introduce them as cate- 
gories in philosophy is to extend its boundaries. 
The deficiencies of Mr. Dewey’s philosophy are 
the deficiencies of the American scene itself: they 
arise out of his too easy acceptance of the Seven- 
teenth and Eighteenth Century framework of ideas; 
and although he has written about the influence of 
Darwinism on philosophy, and has done some of his 
best work in enriching the concepts of philosophy 
with biological illustrations and clues, he has not 
been sufficiently critical of the doctrines and writers 
whose works lean closest to his own habits of think- 
ing. The utilitarian type of personality has been 
for the instrumentalist a thoroughly agreeable one: 
I recollect eulogies of Bacon in Mr. Dewey’s works, 
but none of Shakespeare; appreciations of Locke, 
but not of Milton; of Bentham, but not Shelley and 
Keats and Wordsworth and Blake. The thinkers 
who saw social welfare as the principal object of 
existence, and who naively defined it in terms of 
man’s control over the externalities of his environ- 


ment, through the employment of science and tech- 


[ 261 ] 


The Golden Day 
nology, have been nearest to Mr. Dewey’s heart. He 


has even written as if the telephone did away with 
the necessity for imaginative reverie—as if the imagi- 
nation itself were just a weak and ineffectual sub- 
stitute for the more tangible results of invention! 

This aspect of Mr. Dewey’s instrumentalism is 
bound up with a certain democratic indiscriminate- 
ress in his personal standards: a Goodyear and a 
Morse seem to him as high in the scale of human 
development as a Whitman and a Tolstoi: a rubber 
raincoat is perhaps a finer contribution to human 
life than “Wind, Rain, Speed.”” What indeed is his 
justification for art? Let him answer in his own 
words. ‘Fine art, consciously undertaken as such, 
is peculiarly instrumental in quality. It is a device 
in experimentation, carried on for the sake of edu- 
cation. It exists for the sake of a specialized use, 
use being a training of new modes of perception. 
The creators of such works are entitled, when suc- 
cessful, to the gratitude that we give to inventors 
of microscopes and microphones; in the end they 
open new objects to be observed and enjoyed.” This 
is a fairly back-handed eulogy, unless one remem- 
bers Mr. Dewey’s intense gratitude for all mechani- 
cal instruments. 

In a similar mood, Mr. Dewey speaks of the 

262 7] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


“intrinsic worth of invention;” but the point is, of 
course, that except for the inventor, who is ipso 
facto an artist, the invention is good for what it 
leads to, whereas a scene in nature, a picture, a 
poem, a dance, a beautiful conception of the uni- 
verse, are good for what they are. A well-designed 
machine may also have the same kind of esthetic 
value: but the independent joy it gives to the keen 
mechanic or engineer is not the purpose of its 
design: whereas art has no other purpose; and when 
a Duchamps-Villon or a Man Ray wants to create 
the esthetic equivalent of a machine, he does not 
employ an engineer, but goes through the same 
process he would undergo to model the figure of a 
man. Esthetic enjoyment will often lead to other 
things, and it is all the happier for doing this: the 
scene in nature may lead to the planting of a park, 
the dance may promote physical health: but the 
essential criterion of art is that it is good without 
these specific instrumental results, good as a mode 
of life, good as a beatitude. An intelligent life, 
without these beatitudes, would still be a poor one: 
the fact that Bentham could mention pushpins in 
the same breath as poetry shows the deeply anes- 
thetic and life-denying quality of the utilitarian 
philosophy. 
[ 268] 


The Golden Day 


There are times when Mr. Dewey seems ready to 
admit this deficiency. In Reconstruction in Phi- 
losophy he was aware of the danger of utilitarian 
monsters, driving hard bargains with nature, and 
he was appreciative, to a degree unusual in his 
thought, of the contemplative life, with its loving 
intercourse with forms and shapes and symbols in 
their immediacy. The weakness of Mr. Dewey’s in- 
strumentalism is a weakness of practical emphasis. 
He recognizes the place of the humane arts, but his 
preoccupation has been with science and technology, 
with instrumentalism in the narrow sense, the sense 
in which it occurs to Mr. Babbitt and to all his fol- 
lowers who practice so assiduously the mechanical 
ritual of American life. Conscious of the weakness 
of the academic critic, who may take art as an 
abstract end-in-itself, quite divorced from life and 
experience, he forgets that Mr. Babbitt treats 
showerbath fixtures and automobile gadgets in the 
same way—as if a life spent in the pursuit of these 
contrivances was a noble and liberal one. What 
Mr. Dewey has done in part has been to bolster up 
and confirm by philosophic statement tendencies 
which are already strong and well-established in 
American life, whereas he has been apathetic or dif- 
fident about things which must still be introduced 

[ 264] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


into our scheme of things if it is to become thor- 
oughly humane and significant. What I have said 
of William James applies with considerable force 
to his disciple. 


Vv 


In the revulsion that followed America’s entry 
into the war, Randolph Bourne, one of Mr. Dewey’s 
most ardent and talented disciples, found himself 
bereft of the philosophy which had once seemed all- 
sufficient; its counsel of adjustment left him re 
belliously turning his back on the war-situation and 
the war-technique. In his recoil, Bourne put his 
finger upon the shallow side of Mr. Dewey’s think- 
ing; and his criticism is all the more adequate and 
pertinent because it rested on a sympathetic under- 
standing of the instrumentalist philosophy. 

“To those of us,” he wrote, “who have taken 
Dewey’s philosophy almost as our American religion, 
it never occurred that values could be subordinated 
to technique. We were instrumentalist, but we had 
our private utopias so clearly before our minds that 
the means fell always into place as contributory. 
And Dewey, of course, always meant his philosophy, 
when taken as a philosophy of life, to start with 
values. But there was always that unhappy am- 
| [ 265] 


The Golden Day 


biguity in his doctrine as to just how values were 
created, and it became easier and easier to assume 
that just any growth was justified and almost any 
activity valuable so long as it achieved its ends. The 
American, in living out his philosophy, has habitu- 
ally confused results with product, and been con- 
tent with getting somewhere without asking too 
closely whether it was the desirable place to get. . . . 
You must have your vision, and you must have your 
technique. The practical effect of Dewey’s phi- 
losophy has evidently been to develop the sense of 
the latter at the expense of the former.” 

Without these superimposed values, the values 
that arise out of vision, instrumentalism becomes the 
mere. apotheosis of actualities: it is all dressed up, 
with no place to go. Unfortunately, since the break- 
up of medieval culture, with such interludes as 
humanism and romanticism have supplied, men have 
subordinated the imagination to their interest in 
practical arrangements and expediences, or they 
have completely canalized the imagination itself into 
the practical channels of invention. ‘This has led 
not alone to the conquest of the physical environ- 
ment but also to the maceration of human pur- 
poses. The more men go on in this way, the farther 
they go from the domain of the imagination, and the 


r 266 1 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 


more impossible it becomes for them to recognize the 
part that vision must play in bringing all their prac- 
tical activities into a common focus. Their external 
determinism is only a reflection of their internal 
impotence: their “it must”? can be translated “we 
can’t.” As Bourne said, the whole industrial world 
—and instrumentalism is only its highest conscious 
expression—has taken values for granted; and the 
result is that we are the victims of any chance set 
of values which happens to be left over from the 
past, or to become the fashion. We are living on 
fragments of the old cultures, or on abortions of 
the new, because the energies that should have gone 
into the imaginative life are balked at the source by 
the pervasive instrumentalism of the environment. 

An instrumental philosophy which was oriented 
towards a whole life would begin, I think, not by a 
criticism of obsolete cultural values—which are 
already criticized by the fact that they are obsolete 
and inoperative and the possession of a small aca- 
demic class—it would begin, rather, by a criticism of 
this one-sided idealization of practical contrivances. 
We shall not get much nearer a genuine culture by 
ignoring all the products of the creative imagina- 


tion, or by palming off our practical instrumentali- 


[ 267 ] 


The Golden Day 


ties—excellent though they are in their place—as 
their full equivalent. “If your ideal is to be adjust- 
ment to the situation,’ as Bourne well said, ‘“‘in 
radiant codperation with reality, then your success 
is likely to be just that, and no more. You never 
transcend anything. . . . Vision must constantly 
outshoot technique, opportunist efforts usually 
achieve even less than what obviously seemed pos- 
sible. An impossibilist élan that appeals to desire 
will often carry farther. A philosophy of adjust- 
ment will not even make for adjustment.” 

Brave words! The pragmatists have been de- 
feated, these last few centuries, because they have 
not searched for the kingdom, the power, and the 
glory together, but have sought to achieve power 
alone; so that the kingdom ceased to be a tangible 
one, and they knew no glory, except that which 
flowed out of their pursuit of power. Without 
vision, the pragmatists perish. And our generation, 
in particular, who have seen them fall back, one by 
one, into commercial affairs, into administrative 
absorption, into a pained abandonment of “reform,” 
into taking whatever fortune thrusts into their laps, 
into an acquiescence even more pathetic, perhaps, 
than that of the disabled generation which followed 
the Civil War—our generation may well doubt the 

[ 268 ] 


The Shadow of the Muck-rake 
adequacy of their complaisant philosophy. “Things 


are in the saddle,’ Emerson said, “and ride man- 
kind.” We must overthrow the rider, before we can 


recover the horse: for otherwise, horse and rider may 


drive to the devil. 


[269°] 





CHAPTER SEVEN 
ENVOI 





ENVOI 


ENTERING our own day, one finds the relations of 
culture and experience a little difficult to trace out. 
With the forces that have come over from the past, 
it is fairly easy to reckon: but how these are being 
modified or supplanted by new efforts of experience 
and new stores of culture one cannot with any assur- 
ance tell. Is Robert Frost the evening star of New 
England, or the first streak of a new dawn? Will 
the Dewey who is struggling to step outside his old 
preoccupations influence the coming generation, or 
will the more passive and utilitarian thinker continue 
to dominate? Will our daily activities center more 
completely in metropolises, for which the rest of the 
country serves merely as raw material, or will the 
politics and economics which produce this state give 
place to programs of regional development? What 
is the meaning of Lindsay and Sandburg and Mrs. 
Mary Austin? What is the promise of regional 
universities like Nebraska and North Carolina and 
New Mexico? May we look forward to a steady 

[2787 


The Golden Day 


process of re-settlement; or will the habits of 
nomadry, expansion, and standardization prevail? 
The notion that the forces that are now dominant 
will inevitably continue and grow stronger will not 
stand a close examination. Those who take refuge 
in this comfortable view are merely accepting facts 
as hopes when they think this would be desirable, or 
hopes as facts, when they profess that it is unavoid- 
able. The effort of an age may not lead to its pro- 
longation: it may serve to sharpen its antithesis and 
prepare the way for its own demise. So the stiffen- 
ing of the old Renaissance motifs in the Eighteenth 
Century did not lead to their persistence: they 
formed the thorny nest in which Romanticism was 
hatched. It was in the decade of Watt’s steam 
engine that Percy’s Reliques were published; it was 
in the decade of the steamboat that Scott published 
his Waverley novels. Romanticism, for all its super- 
ficialities, gave men the liberty to breathe again; out 
of the clever imitations of Chatterton grew Words- 
worth, and out of the meretricious Gothic of 
Walpole, Hugo and Viollet-le-Duc took possession 
anew of Notre Dame. I do not say that the 
Romantic poets changed the course of industrialism ; 
but they altered the mood in which industrialism was 


received and quickened the recognition of its poten- 
[274] 


Envoi 


tialities for evil, which a blind and complacent 
utilitarianism might have ignored for generations. 
We have seen American culture as formed largely 
by two events: the breakdown of the medieval 
synthesis, in the centuries that preceded America’s 
settlement and by the transferal to the new soil 
of an abstract and fragmentary culture, given 
definitive form by the Protestants of the Sixteenth 
Century, by the philosophers and scientists of the 
Seventeenth, and by the political thinkers of the 
Eighteenth Century. Faced with the experience of 
the American wilderness, we sought, in the capacity 
of pioneers, to find a new basis for culture in the 
primitive ways of forest and field, in the occupa- 
tions of hunter, woodman, miner and pastoral 
nomad: but these occupations, practiced by people 
who were as much influenced by the idola of utili- 
tarianism as by the deeper effort of the Romantic 
Movement, did not lead towards a durable culture: 
the pioneer environment became favorable to an even 
bleaker preoccupation with the abstractions of mat- 
ter, money, and political rights. In this situation, 
the notion of a complete souety, carrying on a com- 
plete and symmetrical life, tended to disappear from 
the minds of every one except the disciples of 


Fourier; with the result that business, technology 
[275] | 


The Golden Day 


and science not merely occupied their legitimate 
place but took to themselves all that had hitherto 
belonged to art, religion, and poetry. Positive 
knowledge and practical action, which are indispen- 
sable elements in every culture, became the only 
living sources of our own; and as the Nineteenth 
Century wore on, we moved within an ever narrower 
circle of experience, living mean and illiberal lives. 
The moving out of Europe was not merely due to 
the lure of free land and a multitude of succulent 
foods: it pointed to cultural vacancy. For three 
centuries the best minds in Europe had either been 
trying to get nourishment from the leftovers of 
classic culture or the Middle Ages, or they had been 
trying to reach some older source of experience, in 
order to supplement their bare spiritual fare. 
Science built up a new conception of the universe, 
and it endowed its disciples with the power to under- 
stand—and frequently to eontrol—external events; 
but it achieved these results by treating men’s cen- 
tral interests and desires as negligible, ignoring 
the fact that science itself was but a mode of man’s 
activity as a living creature, and that its effort 
to cancel out the human element was only a very 
ingenious human expedient. In America, it was easy 


for an Emerson or a Whitman to see the importance 


[276] 


Envot 


of welding together the interests which science rep- 
resented, and those which, through the accidents of 
its historic development, science denied. Turning 
from a limited European past to a wider heritage, 
guiding themselves by all the reports of their own 
day, these poets continued the old voyages of explo- 
ration on the plane of the mind, and, seeking passage 
to India, found themselves coasting along strange 
shores. None of the fine minds of the Golden Day 
was afraid to welcome the new forces that were at 
large in the world. Need I recall that Whitman 
wrote an apostrophe to the locomotive, that Emer- 
son said a steamship sailing promptly between 
America and Europe might be as beautiful as a 
star, and that Thoreau, who loved to hear the wind 
in the pine needles, listened with equal pleasure to 
the music of the telegraph wires? 

That practical instrumentalities were to be wor- 
shiped, never occurred to these writers; but that 
they added a new and significant element to our 
culture, which the poet was ready to absorb and 
include in his report upon the universe, was pro- 
foundly true. It is this awareness of new sources 
of experience that distinguishes the American writ- 
ers of the Golden Day from their contemporaries in 


Europe. That the past was merely provisional, and 
[277 ] 


The Golden Day 


that the future might be formed afresh were two 
patent generalizations which they drew directly 
from their environment. These perceptions called, 
of course, for great works of the imagination; for 
in proportion as intelligence was dealing more effec- 
tually with the instrumentalities of life, it became 
more necessary for the imagination to project more 
complete and satisfying ends. The attempt to pre- 
figure in the imagination a culture which should 
grow out of and refine the experiences the trans- 
planted European encountered on the new soil, 
mingling the social heritage of the past with the 
experience of the present, was the great activity of 
the Golden Day: the essays of Emerson, the poems 
of Whitman, the solitary musings of Melville all 
clustered around this central need. None of these 
men was caught by the dominant abstractions: each 
saw life whole, and sought a whole life. 

We cannot return to the America of the Golden 
Day, nor keep it fixed in the postures it once nat- 
urally assumed ; and we should be far from the spirit 
of Emerson or Whitman if we attempted to do this. 
But the principal writers of that time are essential 
links between our own lives and that earlier, that 
basic, America. In their work, we can see in pristine 
state the essential characteristics that still lie under 


C278] 


Ei nvoi 


the surface: and from their example, we can more 
readily find our own foundations, and make our own 
particular point of departure. In their imagina- 
tions, a new world began to form out of the dis- 
tracting chaos: wealth was in its place, and science 
was in its place, and the deeper life of man began 
again to emerge, no longer stunted or frustrated by 
the instrumentalities it had conceived and set to 
work. For us who share their vision, a revival of 
the moribund, or a relapse into the pragmatic 
acquiescence is equally impossible; and we begin again 
to dream Thoreau’s dream—of what it means to live 
a whole human life. 

A complete culture leads to the nurture of the 
good life; it permits the fullest use, or sublimation, 
of man’s natural functions and activities. Con- 
fronted by the raw materials of existence, a culture 
works them over into new patterns, in which the woof 
of reality is crossed by the warp of desire. Love 
is the type of desire in all its modes; and in the 
recent emergence of a handful of artists who by the 
force of their inner life have seen the inessential and 
makeshift character of a large part of the daily 
routine, there is perhaps the prophecy of a new 
stream of tendency in American life. | 

Henry Adams, in his Education, observed that the 

[ 279 ] 


The Golden Day 


American artist, in distinction to all the great 
writers of classic times, seemed scarcely conscious of — 
the power of sex: he was aware of neither a Virgin 
nor a Venus. In the works of Sherwood Anderson, 
Edna Millay, Eugene O’Neill, and Waldo Frank 
this aversion has disappeared: human passion comes 
back to the scene with almost volcanic exuberance, 
drawing all the habits and conventionalties and 
prudences in its wake. It is through. brooding over 
their sexual experience that Mr. Anderson’s char- 
acters begin to perceive the weaknesses, the limita- 
tions, the sordidness of the life about them: they 
awaken with the eagerness of a new adolescence to 
discover, like the father in Many Marriages, that 
what seemed to them “real life,” the externalisms, 
the business arrangements, the neat routine of office 
and factory, was in fact an unrelated figment, some- 
thing which drew upon a boyish self that made sand- 
piles, whittled sticks, or played soldier and wanted 
to be captain. Whereas the deep and disruptive 
force that rouses them, and makes beauty credible 
and desire realizable, is not, as the Gradgrinds would 
have it, a dream at all, but the prelude to every en- 
during reality. 

Desire is real! Sherwood Anderson’s people come 
to this, as to a final revelation. But if sexual desire, 


[ 280] 


E'nvoi 


why not every human desire? In full lust of life 
man is not merely a poor creature, wryly adjusting 
himself to external circumstances: he is also a 
creator, an artist, making circumstances conform to 
the aims and necessities he himself freely imposes. 
**Sooner murder an infant in its cradle,” wrote Wil- 
ham Blake, “than nurse unacted desireg;”? and in the 
deep sense of Blake’s application, this covers every 


aspect of life, since a failure of desire, imagination, 
and vision tends to spread over into every activity. 
Practical intelligence and a prudent adjustment to 
externalities are useful only in a secondary position: 
they are but props to straighten the plant when 
it begins to grow: at the bottom of it all must be 
a soil and a seed, an inner burgeoning, an eagerness 
of life. Art in its many forms is a union of imagina- 
tive desire, desire sublimated and socialized, with 
actuality: without this union, desires become idiotic, 
and actualities perhaps even a little more so. It is 
not that our instrumental activities are mean: far 
from it: but that life is mean when it is entirely ab- 
sorbed in instrumental activities. Beneath the or- 
ganized vivacity of our American communities, who 
is not aware of a blankness, a sterility, a boredom, 


a despair? Their activity, their very lust, is the 


[2817] 


The Golden Day 


galvanic response to an external stimulus, given by 
an organism that is dead. 

The power to escape from this sinister world can 
come only by the double process of encountering 
more complete modes of life, and of reformulating 
a more vital tissue of ideas and symbols to supplant 
those which have led us into the stereotyped inter- 
ests and actions which we endeavor in vain to iden- 
tify with a full human existence. We must rectify 
the abstract framework of ideas which we have used, 
in leu of a full culture, these last few centuries. 
In part, we shall achieve this by a criticism of the 
past, which will bring into the foreground those 
things that have been left out of the current scheme 
of life and thought. Mr. A. N. Whitehead’s Science 
and the Modern World, and Mr. Victor Branford’s 
Science and Sanctity are landmarks towards this 
new exploration; for they both suggest the ground- 
work of a philosophy which shall be oriented as com- 
pletely towards Life as the dominant thought since 
Descartes has been directed towards the Machine. 
To take advantage of our experience and our social 
heritage and to help in creating this new idolum is 
not the smallest adventure our generation may know. 
It is more imaginative than the dreams of the tran- 
scendentalist, more practical than the work of the 


[282] 


Envoi 


pragmatists, more drastic than the criticisms of the 
old social revolutionists, and more deeply cultural 
than all our early attempts to possess the simulacra 
of culture. It is nothing less than the effort to con- 


ceive a new world. 
Allons! the road is before us! 


THE END 


[283 7] 

















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